


Stick to Your Guns

by temporal-infidelity (gyabou)



Series: Out at the Pictures-verse [2]
Category: Misfits (TV 2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, Healing, M/M, Marriage, Not Canon Compliant, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2019-12-25 10:14:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18259235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gyabou/pseuds/temporal-infidelity
Summary: An emotionally stunted fuckwit struggles to adult and emerges from his chrysalis as a beautiful butterfly (sort of) Part II.Marriage wasn’t exactly what he thought it would be like. They weren’t like married couples on the telly or in films or like his parents, who’d yelled and screamed and thrown things a lot, or like the neighbors next door growing up, who drank wine and went ballroom dancing on Friday nights. Barry felt less like his husband and more like a partner in crime, which technically he sort of was, and had been for awhile. But now it was just the two of them, heading out into the great unknown, and when he thought about all those nights he’d spent alone, sleeping on that hard mat in the community centre, he was so fucking grateful and relieved that this was how it had turned out.





	1. The Journey

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be chapter 2 of Out at the Pictures, but it turned into a monster. When I realized I wasn't even halfway through the story and it was already half as long as chapter 1 had been, I decided to reconfigure things.
> 
> This story is a little darker than OatP, as you can probably tell from the tags. It deals a lot with depression, death, and Nathan using the sexual part of his relationship with Simon as a distraction, so if those are things that are triggers for you, proceed with caution. The ending will be a little more optimistic, if that helps.

_Give him what he needs_  
_Let him see what he sees_  
_Let him feel how he feels_  
_Leave him out to sea_  
_It's alright by me_  
_Let him stay in bed_  
_Until he is fed up_

The Cribs, "Stick to Yr Guns"

 

* * *

 

If getting married had been a pain, applying for a visa was a nightmare.

In April, after Simon had gotten his acceptances and chosen the school he was going to attend -- he settled on Northeastern’s Digital Media Studies program -- they began the whole visa process. There were forms to be filled out and interviews to attend. Not only did they have to submit their marriage certificate, but they also had to give other proof of the wedding, such as a photo of them with Kelly and Alisha, the witnesses (Simon being Simon, he had researched the entire thing beforehand and made sure it was all done on the day) and an affidavit from the register’s office. Simon had to get American health insurance, and Nathan had to be put on it as a dependent. They had to get waivers for their old criminal convictions. They had to submit years of pay slips and proof of income. And then they had to pay a hefty fee and wait.

“What exactly am I going to do over there?” Nathan wondered. He wouldn’t be able to work. Of course, he’d done nothing but bitch and moan his entire adult life about working, but the idea not being able to at all was a little startling. They’d have to be very careful with Simon’s stipend and savings and it was going to be sort of embarrassing not to contribute in some way. The only thing he had to offer the money his mother’d given to them after they’d gotten married, and even more shockingly, the check that had come in the mail a few weeks later with a terse congratulatory note from his father. (He’d almost wanted to spend it all on booze just to spite him, but Simon had convinced him otherwise.)

“You can take classes,” Simon offered. “Not towards a degree or anything, but if you end up wanting to do that, or if you get offered a job, you can apply to change your visa status.”

Nathan restrained himself from saying something sarcastic. He’d never had any interest in returning to school, and the idea that someone might offer him a job seemed laughable.

Eventually, their visas came through. Nathan couldn’t quite believe it. It was actually happening. They were moving to America.

  


They flew from Heathrow to Logan airport on the last day of July. For weeks, they’d to whittle down the belongings they’d accumulated over the years until it could all fit into two suitcases and two carry-ons, as well as a box they mailed ahead to the apartment they were renting a room in (Nathan’s premonition that he’d be sharing a flat with a bunch of strangers had in fact come true, but at least he had Barry there with him).

Simon, it turned out, and perhaps this was predictable, did not like flying. During the entire ascent he held Nathan’s hand in a death grip while Nathan read out loud from _Skymall_ to try to calm him down. After that, Nathan made him take two Benadryl and he passed out for the rest of the flight.

Nathan didn’t mind flying at all; in fact he rather liked it. He liked sitting in the window seat, he liked seeing the ocean and the clouds beneath it. Still, he’d never flown as far away as this, and not with such permanence. The closest to this was when he and mum had moved to London from Ireland, but he’d been just a kid and hadn’t really realized what a huge difference it was going to be. Now he was leaving everything behind and he and Barry would be basically starting over from scratch.

He turned his head from the window to look at Barry, sleeping next to him, his head resting against Nathan’s upper arm. He rubbed his thumb against the smoothness of the wedding band on his left hand, a tic he’d picked up over the last few months, as though he were constantly surprised that it was there. Marriage wasn’t exactly what he thought it would be like. They weren’t like married couples on the telly or in films or like his parents, who’d yelled and screamed and thrown things a lot, or like the neighbors next door growing up, who drank wine and went ballroom dancing on Friday nights. Barry felt less like his husband and more like a partner in crime, which technically he sort of was, and had been for awhile. But now it was just the two of them, heading out into the great unknown, and when he thought about all those nights he’d spent alone, sleeping on that hard mat in the community centre, he was so fucking grateful and relieved that this was how it had turned out.

Closing his eyes and resting his head against Simon’s, he fell asleep, too.

  


They’d left London at around four in the afternoon, flown for seven and a half hours, and arrived in Boston around seven in the evening, thanks to the magic of timezones. Despite sleeping on the plane, or maybe because of it, they felt groggy and exhausted. While waiting (endlessly) at the baggage carousel, Nathan glared at the still-bright sunshine coming in through the windows, in defiance of the fact that in his opinion, it ought to be nearly midnight.

After collecting their suitcases, they got a cab, which sped them away from the airport and into a dark tunnel, which the cabbie informed them was actually built under the harbor; above their heads was ninety feet of water. Nathan, who had been through the Chunnel before, but not since the whole being buried alive fiasco, began to feel a little tense; his heart hammered in his chest, his palms got sweaty, and he couldn’t seem to catch a breath.

“You claustrophobic, buddy?” the driver said, squinting at him in the rearview mirror. “Don’t worry, we’ll be out of here soon.”

Simon looked at him with concern, but didn’t say anything. He just put a hand over Nathan’s clenched fist and held it tightly until they were out.

The apartment they were moving to was in a neighborhood called Allston. “You guys students?” the cabbie asked. “They call this place the student ghetto.”

If this was supposed to be a ghetto, Nathan thought, watching as the triple deckers and old Victorian houses speed by, he wondered what the hell Wertham was. He didn’t see anything like the old council estate blocks he knew so well, no concrete jungle. It looked more like Shoreditch or Hoxton to him.

“You okay?” Simon asked.

“Hm?” he asked, and realized he was chewing on the string of one of his hoodies. He really wanted a cigarette.

“You’re very quiet,” Simon said. “It’s very unlike you.” He smiled.

Before Nathan could answer, the cab pulled over. “Here we are,” the driver said, getting out.

The house was a pale blue two level with porches on both floors and a peaked roof. They dragged their suitcases up the front stairs, and while Simon was fumbling with the keys, the door swung open. A girl with short dark hair and Asian features was standing in the doorway. “You’re here!” she said, then twisted around and bellowed upstairs, “THEY’RE HERE!”

The next few minutes were a whirl of activity. A stream of people thundered down the stairs; they helped them carry all their luggage up and into a small, crowded, slighlty stuffy living room, where seats were offered, apologies were made for the weakness of the air-conditioning, and cold bottles of beer were pressed into their hands. Their roommates introduced themselves: Emily, the girl who had opened the door: she was an engineering student at Boston University; Alberto, a tall, slight international student from Puerto Rico who was in the composition program at Berklee School of Music; and Rebecca, a short, curvy bespectacled girl who was studying children’s literature at Simmons College. Simon had emailed with Emily in order to rent the room, and so the three of them seemed to know a lot about him. Nathan was beginning to feel a little irritated, although maybe it was just his exhaustion, and was sitting silently drinking his beer until suddenly Emily turned to him and began peppering him with questions. How was the flight, did he miss home, oh, was he from Ireland? What part? You’ll find there’s a lot of Irish stuff in Boston, but you’ll probably find most of it pretty cheesy, etc. etc. until Nathan just wanted to curl up and go to sleep and Barry came to his rescue and said they should probably go to bed.

The flat itself was unusual; off the nucleus of the sitting room and the kitchen there was a series of four bedrooms of varying and unusual sizes, and two bathrooms, like a sort of a petalled flower. None of the furniture in the living room matched, half of it looking like it came from a charity shop and the other half from Ikea. There was a cabinet in one corner overflowing with bottles of alcohol, and one side of the already small room was taken up by two bicycles.

Their room was the largest, thankfully, and had two windows, one facing the street, and one occupied by an old, yellowed air conditioner, which someone had thoughtfully already turned on for them. It was furnished with a double bed, a desk, and a low dresser. The box that Simon had sent ahead was sitting under one of the windows. While Simon ripped it open, took out sheets and blankets, and started to make their bed, Nathan pushed open the free window -- it was old and stiff and took a bit of effort -- and, leaning out, lit up a cigarette.

“Ah, that’s the stuff,” he said after the first inhale.

Simon was smoothing out the top sheet. “Aren’t you tired?” he asked, yawning. “You must be, you’ve been so quiet all night.”

Nathan didn’t answer, just rolled the cigarette around in his mouth and peered down into the street, dimly lit by a few street lights. There was something dark and small moving beneath one of them: a cat or a raccoon, maybe. 

He wasn’t quiet because he was tired, really. He was quiet because he felt … lost. He thought he could adapt to anything, that moving to another country wouldn’t faze him at all, but he had only been here three hours, tops, and he already felt completely at sea. Looking at the unfamiliar houses, the trees that just didn’t quite match, the weird street signs -- even the way the night smelled was wrong -- he wondered what the hell he was doing here.

But there was no way he was going to say any of that.

Simon put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go to bed.”

  


Not long after, when the room was dark and they were both trying to get comfortable in the strange bed, Simon murmured, “Can I tell you something?”

Nathan tilted his body forward, pressed his nose against Simon’s neck, smelling his familiar Barry-smell, and poked him in the small of his back. “I don’t know, can you?”

Squirming a little bit away, then relaxing back into him in a sort of capitulative slump, Simon said, “I’m terrified.”

He couldn’t stifle the little huff of laughter that erupted from him, his breath disturbing the fine hairs at Barry’s nape. He wrapped one arm around him and waited. He had learned to shut up and let Barry talk at moments like this, because if he didn’t, whatever was on his mind usually wouldn’t get said.

“I’ve just been so busy preparing to get here,” Simon said into the darkness, “I haven’t really had time to think about it much, and now that we’re here … what if I made a big mistake?”

“You did make a big mistake,” Nathan said solemnly. “You married me, didn’t you, you idiot? Too late, you’re stuck now.”

Simon slapped his arm, then wriggled around until he was facing him.

“Everything’s going to be fine, Barry,” Nathan said. “You’re the most with it person I know, which is pretty incredible considering how we all started.”

Simon smiled that funny, crooked smile of his, and kissed him. When he pulled away, Nathan waggled his eyebrows.

“Wanna fuck?” he said.

Simon grinned, then his face fell and he looked back at the door. “I don’t know …”

“Oh, come on. They’ll have to learn to what freaks we are eventually.”

Abruptly, Simon pushed him onto his back and, leaning over him, whispered, “Try to be a little less noisy than you usually are.”

“Well, you’re just going to have to shut me up, aren’t you?”

Simon groaned. “When don’t I have to do that?”

Nathan grinned, all teeth, like the big bad wolf, but it was Simon who leaned down and gently bit him, right where his neck met his shoulder. He gave a little gasp, and then, in his most over the top, passionate tone, loudly whispered, “ _Do me, Barry!_ ”

“Shhh.”

And Nathan was quiet.


	2. Summer.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The water felt just as good as it had the first time. He dove underwater and let it swallow him up whole. When he resurfaced, he began to swim straight out, strong front crawl strokes like they’d had to learn in school, gliding past all the little kids with paddleboards and the old people floating on their backs, towards where the ocean met the horizon in a dark blue line. When he got tired he stopped and just let himself drift, the water splashing against his face as he struggled to catch his breath. He felt more alive than he had in ages._

Nathan was woken the next morning by voices speaking in hushed tones. When he cracked open his eyes, Simon was standing at the door in a t-shirt and shorts, talking to someone. After a minute he closed the door and turned back to the bed.

“Oh, you’re awake,” he said, as Nathan struggled to sit up. On Simon’s side of the bed, there was a book open, face down, one of the textbooks for his classes, which didn’t start for two weeks.

“What’s up?” he mumbled, yawning.

“They wanted to know if we were going to breakfast with them.”

“Fuck yes,” Nathan said. “I want waffles.” He slumped back onto the bed. “You might have to carry me though. I think you broke my arse last night.”

Simon swatted said ass. “Get up.”

Their roommates took them to a diner called The Breakfast Club, which was in walking distance from their apartment. The August weather was swelteringly hot, much hotter than it normally got in London, and the sun reflecting off the pavement was so bright it made Nathan’s eyes hurt. As they walked, their roommates pointed out highlights of the neighborhood and other bits of information about the city, the “T” (which was what they called the tube here) and how to get a pass for it, what the seasons were like, etc. It was a chaotic stream of information, the three of them interrupting each other to give their own opinions, and half of it Nathan promptly forgot; Simon listened intently with a furrowed brow as though trying to commit every bit to memory.

“So how did you two meet?” Rebecca asked, after they had squeezed their way into the both at the diner.

They both froze and glanced at each other.

Simon said, “Er, well …”

Then Nathan thought, _fuck it_ , and said, “Actually, Barry and I met doing community service.”

“Barry?” Alberto repeated, smiling.

Nathan waved one hand. “Oh yeah, that’s just what I call Simon.”

“Community service?” Rebecca said, raising one eyebrow.

“Well,” Simon said, flushing, “it was a long time ago, well, six or seven years ago, I guess, and we were different --”

“What Barry’s trying to say is that we were a couple of juvenile offenders, but we did our time and now we’re reformed citizens,” Nathan said smoothly, and sat back to watch their reactions.

The three roommates looked each other, then one by one they shrugged, and Nathan figured it would be fine.

So long as they didn’t ask what exactly they’d done to get community service and find out that Simon had nearly burned a house down, he supposed.

  


The first few weeks were a blur. They unpacked, bought things they hadn’t been able to bring; Simon attended orientation; the roommates took them around the city, got them Charlie cards, and showed them the sights, the typical sort of shit you’d show a tourist. They took them to Boston Public Garden and pointed out the lesbian swans, Romeo and Juliet, who lived in the pond. They brought them to the North End and got them cannoli, and then they accidentally stumbled across the Feast of St. Anthony, which involved people throwing confetti and occasionally money at a statue of the aforementioned saint as it was processed down the street. They went up to the top of Prudential Center where they stood on their tiptoes peering through a barrier at the cityscape because nobody wanted to pay money to enter the skywalk observatory.

When not otherwise occupied, Nathan slept a lot, especially when Simon was busy doing other things, like trying to study ahead before his classes started, the little swot. Nathan had a system: he pushed their bed right up against the wall where the window containing the air conditioner unit and would lie across the bed the wrong way so that the cold air was pulsing right over him. It was the best way to get comfortable. And he didn’t have much else to do, except sit on the couch and watch episodes of _RuPaul’s Drag Race_ with Becca, but she had a job at a bookstore and wasn’t around all the time.

One day, he was sleeping like this and woke up in a sort of cold sweat, afternoon light filtering in around the edges of the curtains, and Simon staring down at him with a look of concern.

“Hey, Barry,” he said. “What’s wrong? You look like Morrissey just died.” He scrambled around looking for his phone, which was lost somewhere in the sheets he’d kicked away. “He didn’t, did he? I’m ready for any of them to go, ever since Bowie kicked it.”

Simon sat down on the bed. “I’m just a little worried.”

“About what?” Nathan sat up, scratching at his head and yawning. “School again? You’ll do fine, man, you’re probably more prepared than the lot of them.”

“Not that,” Simon said. “I meant I’m worried about you.”

Nathan’s hackles rose. “What d’you mean? There’s nothing to be worried about.”

“I’m not criticizing you,” Simon said in a hurry. “I know there’s not much you can do here but …”

He didn’t say anything. Instead, he slid off the bed, found his discarded t-shirt and jeans, and pulled them on.

“Where are you going?” Simon asked.

“Just outside to have a smoke,” he mumbled, checking to see if his cigarettes and lighter were still in his pocket. “Don’t get all het up.”

“I’m not all het up,” Simon said, his voice thick with frustration. “I’m sorry. I just don’t want you to be unhappy here.”

“Me? Unhappy?” Nathan said, and threw back his head and laughed. “I’m fine, Barry. I’m living the fucking dream here. I’m a kept man.” He sat on Simon’s lap. “You’re my sugar daddy.”

Barry gave him a crooked smile. “I just wish I could keep you in the manner to which you’d like to become accustomed.”

“This’ll do,” Nathan said, smoothly. Inside, he was almost shaking with relief that he’d turned the conversation around. He rested his head against Barry’s shoulder and kissed his neck, and Barry shivered.

“I thought you were going outside to smoke,” he said, his voice rough.

“That can wait,” Nathan said, pressing him down onto the bed, “I’m practically made of free time, after all.”

It was later, when Nathan lying flat on his back next to a dozing Simon, and he was idly thinking about getting dressed again and getting that smoke at last, that he found himself thinking about the night that things had changed between them, when everything got serious and real.

They’d been fucking for weeks, ever since the tattoo thing had happened, and it had been great, Simon all nervy and twitchy but increasingly competent and weirdly possessive, Nathan glib and satisfied because he was finally getting laid on a regular basis, even if it was with the Weird Kid -- he wasn’t that bad. Pretty great actually.

It was afterwards, in a moment like this one, when they were lying on the shitty little mattress in the community centre that Nathan called a bed, all sweaty and exhausted, that Simon had suddenly pulled him very close, holding him like he was the most important thing in the world, and said, “I hate that you have to live here.”

Nathan had pulled away, a little surprised, because the whole thing had become sort of normal to him, and to everyone else: Nathan was homeless. He lived in the community centre. He subsisted on chips stolen from the vending machine and beer stolen from the activities room and cigarettes he either bummed or bought with coins he scrounged up from the wishing fountain at the city centre. And every once in awhile, he died. “It’s not so bad, man,” he said, in that way he had when he didn’t really want to talk about something.

But Simon hadn’t been deterred, had just stroked his back gently, and said, “One day, when I get a job, I’ll get a flat, and then you can stay there.”

Something inside Nathan’s chest had prickled, like he’d been stung by a wasp, a funny little ache that was almost more physical than emotional. He nearly said _Moving a little fast there, ain’t you, Barry_ but the words got all tangled in his throat and instead he said, “Will there be a white picket fence and a dog called Rover, too?”

Barry had grinned, and said, “If that’s what you want, sure.” As if what he wanted had any importance. And then he’d given him another squeeze and said, “I just want to take care of you,” which had rendered Nathan unusually speechless, because he couldn’t for the life of him remember anyone ever saying anything like that to him before.

The next day, when they’d been heading over to whatever community service project they’d been assigned that day with the rest of the group, the two of them walking so close their hands were occasionally brushing against each other, Nathan had caught Barry’s hand in his own, in front of everyone. Simon had gone white with shock but hadn’t let his hand go. Nobody had said anything, though they all saw, but in retrospect they must have already known; Kelly certainly had, based on the weird looks she’d given Nathan whenever he was thinking about their nightly activities, and she’d probably told the rest of them. But it had been important nonetheless. From that day forward, they were a pair, a team, just the two of them.

And Barry had done exactly what he’d said he would. He’d got a job and a flat and he’d taken care of Nathan. And now here they were, married, a thousand miles away. Sometimes Nathan wondered what would have happened if he’d said the first shitty thing that had come to mind when Simon had made that promise; he could imagine Barry going mute with hurt and embarrassment, the quick erosion of newly forged ties, a return to nights alone in the dark, creepy community centre. Where would that other Nathan be now? Still homeless? In jail, maybe. Definitely not here, well fucked and well taken care of across the sea. He was lucky. He hadn’t fucked it up.

So he couldn’t really turn to Simon and say, _actually Barry, I think I might be fucking depressed, and it’s not really a new thing, I’ve kind of always been like that, only this is the first time I haven’t had anything to distract me from it. Whinge, whinge, guess I’ll go see a therapist and waste a bunch of your money_. That’d be a fun conversation, wouldn’t it?

He sat up and started to get dressed. Simon’s eyes opened and he rolled over to watch him. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he murmured sleepily.

“Mmm?” Nathan said around the cigarette he’d already perched between his lips, as he stood and buttoned his jeans.

“Everybody’s going to the beach tomorrow,” Simon said. “Our flatmates, I mean. They invited us. Do you want to go?”

“Sure.” At least it would be something different. Instead of sweating his balls off in this room, he could be sweating his balls off and getting sand up his arsecrack on the seashore.

Simon smiled and closed his eyes again.

  


Outside, Nathan sat on the porch steps and smoked and wiped perspiration from his forehead and thought about all the endless empty days ahead. He was trying to calculate how many days there were to get through when something soft brushed against his outstretched leg, making him jump.

At his feet there was a scraggly looking cat, all white and peach colored, with pale gray eyes. One of its ears had a notch in it, like something had tried to take a bite out of it. Nathan thought about the dark shape he’d seen moving under the streetlight the night they’d moved in and wondered if this had been the owner of it. Cautiously, he reached out one hand, and the cat sniffed it delicately, then rubbed its cheek against his palm.

“You’re a greedy little slut for attention, aren’t you,” he murmured, rubbing it under its chin. “Just like me.” The cat purred and looked at him with strange intensity, then flopped on its side. Nathan sat and petted it and realized he’d lost track of the math in his head, and decided it didn’t matter, anyway.

  


He felt better the next day. While everyone was loading up Rebecca’s rusty old Camry he poked around in the bushes to see if he could find the cat, but it was nowhere to be found, and when Simon asked him what he was looking for, he told him the whole thing was full of spiders, which was guaranteed to end the conversation.

It was a cramped fit inside the car, with Al, Simon, and himself crammed into the back seat, but there was lots of laughing and joking, and it was almost like having the gang back together, Kelly and Alisha and Curtis and them all, except with less trash collection and orange jumpsuits. There wasn’t any way to hook up an iPhone to Becca’s car, so they had to listen to the radio, and the only station they could agree on was one playing classic rock, which led to them all screaming out loud the lyrics to Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” as they sped north out of the city along the Zakim Bridge. Well -- Becca, Emily, and Nathan sang -- Al didn’t know the lyrics, though he picked up on the chorus by the end of it, and Simon took out his phone and filmed them, grinning mutely, his eyes shining.

It was about an hour’s drive up to Hampton Beach in New Hampshire, which Nathan and Simon had been promised was home to the sleaziest of New England beaches, complete with a boardwalk and an arcade filled with games dating back to 60s -- all things Nathan heartily approved of. As they entered the town, Emily and Rebecca pointed out the various landmarks (“Here are the beautiful salt marshes. And here is the beautiful nuclear power plant”).

They decided to hit up the arcade first, where Nathan racked up close to three hundred tickets playing skeeball, and then Barry went and won the jackpot on one of those stupid games of chance. Nathan convinced him to go in with him on buying a huge assortment of plastic snakes from the prize cabinet, purely so that he could plant them around the flat in strategic locations when they got home. They stopped at the boardwalk for lunch, where Nathan proceeded to fellate a corn dog for Simon’s viewing displeasure.

And then finally, the beach.

They stumbled down the stairs to the beach, past a large posted sign warning swimmers about rip currents, with a long list of instructions about what to do if you were caught in them, which Simon tried to stop and read before Nathan shouted at him to hurry up. The sun was so hot that the sand burned their bare feet. The beach was crowded with people, but they managed to find a spot to lay their blankets out on. Barry began methodically covering every single inch of his exposed skin with sunscreen, while Nathan awkwardly sprayed himself, dancing around a little bit and hoping he’d hit the most important spots.

And then finally, the water.

“It’s cold!” Al complained, shivering as a wave hit him. “How is it so cold when it’s so hot?”

Nathan didn’t mind the cold at all. It wasn’t any colder than the beaches were back home. He ran, yelling, into the surf, and dived right in, emerging moments later, his teeth chattering, to see Simon still standing with the water only up to his ankles, looking a little dubious about the whole thing.

“Come on!” he shouted. “It feels great!”

Simon pressed his lips together and went a few more paces in. Nathan rolled his eyes, then held his breath and dunked himself.

Under the water, he felt nearly weightless. Time seemed to loose meaning, sound was weird and muffled, and the shapes of the other people in the water were wavy and indistinct. He could just see Barry’s legs walking towards him. He propelled himself upwards.

“There you are!” he shouted.

Barry was frowning. “You were under for a long time.”

Nathan shrugged, and Simon looked like he was going to say something more, but Emily, who was floating near them, suddenly pointed and shouted, “Oh shit! Look at that wave!”

Simon’s expression turned stricken, and Nathan twisted around to look behind himself and laughed. It was a pretty big wave. It hadn’t crested yet, but the top of it looked like it was just about to start to curve. Simon began to paddle backwards, but Nathan grabbed him insistently and plunged them both towards the wave, catching it just in time so that they could bob over the surface of it, just before it folded over and crashed down onto the spot where Simon had been a moment ago. Emily wasn’t so lucky, shrieking as the water hit her, but she resurfaced a minute later, shaking her head and spitting out water, and then dove with determination further out so that she wouldn’t meet the same fate the next time.

“Let’s go back,” Simon insisted, trying to catch his breath.

“Wait until it calms down a little,” Nathan urged. “I’ve got you, don’t worry, you pussy,” and he squeezed Simon’s arm. Simon grabbed him with his other hand, holding onto him in a death grip as the next wave came. “That’s not so bad, is it?” Nathan said. He felt wonderful, completely carefree, like he could float away into cool nothingness and never be heard from again.

The waves eventually calmed, and Nathan reluctantly allowed Simon to drag him back to shore like a stubborn selkie. He only gave in because his feet were starting to feel numb and his fingers had pruned up. Emily stayed in, but Al and Becca were already back at their blanket, reading. Nathan slumped onto the blanket and laid face down and let the sun beat down on his cold, wet body. Next to him, Simon sat down at began to reapply sunscreen. He poked the bottle into Nathan’s side, but he shooed him away. “I’m fine,” he mumbled.

He must have dozed off for a little bit. When he sat up, Emily was back, and now she was reading something too, and Simon was looking at one of his bloody textbooks again, and Nathan was _bored_.

“Go back in the water with me,” he said to Simon.

“In a bit,” Simon said, his voice distracted.

“Do you want something to read?” Becca asked. “There are books in my bag.”

Nathan sighed. He didn’t want to read. He didn’t _read_. He lived with a bunch of nerds now. They weren’t like the old gang at all.

But there was nothing else to do, so he dragged Becca’s bag over to him and dumped it out. The books were all young adult titles, because that was what she studied at school. He picked one at random and began to skim it. He flipped to the end and read the last page, which he loved doing to books Simon was reading, because it pissed him off so much.

_The universe may forget us, but our light will brighten the darkness for eons after we've departed this world. The universe may forget us, but it can't forget us until we're gone, and we're still here, our futures still unwritten. We can choose to sit on our asses and wait for the end, or we can live right now. We can march to the edge of the void and scream in defiance. Yell out for all to hear that we do matter. That we are still here, living our absurd, bullshit lives, and nothing can take that away from us. Not rogue comets, not black holes, not the heat death of the universe. We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live. The universe may forget us, but it doesn't matter. Because we are the ants, and we'll keep marching on._

He closed the book and tossed it aside and closed his eyes. His skin wasn’t cold and wet anymore, the sun was no longer a comforting blanket against it. He felt itchy and raw.

“I’m going in,” he said, sitting up.

Simon looked up. “Just wait a few more minutes, I’ll go with you.”

But Nathan was already standing. “It’s fine, keep reading your boring bullshit. I’m just going in and out. You don’t really want to go anyway.” And then before Simon could say anything, he jogged away towards the shoreline.

The water felt just as good as it had the first time. He dove underwater and let it swallow him up whole. When he resurfaced, he began to swim straight out, strong front crawl strokes like they’d had to learn in school, gliding past all the little kids with paddleboards and the old people floating on their backs, towards where the ocean met the horizon in a dark blue line. When he got tired he stopped and just let himself drift, the water splashing against his face as he struggled to catch his breath. He felt more alive than he had in ages.

“Nathan!” he heard distantly. Lazily, he turned towards the shore. He could see Barry’s pale white form standing there, far away. He sighed and began to paddle back.

He had been swimming for a few minutes before he realized he hadn’t made much, or maybe any, progress. Usually swimming back to shore was easy, the waves propelling you every few minutes, and you just had to struggle in those moments before when the undertow gripped you. But there weren’t really any waves at all. He swam harder, but the shore and the other swimmers seemed to get even further away.

It took him an embarrassingly long time to realize that he was caught in a rip current.

For a moment he just floated there, stunned, and then he tried to remember what the stupid sign they’d passed had said. Swim parallel to the shore? Don’t struggle? Something like that. He began to try to do that, but he wasn’t sure how to know he was out of the current, and he was suddenly completely exhausted, his arms and legs heavy like deadweights. The water was too cold now, even for him, and he kept accidentally swallowing big gulps of it, and it tasted like absolute ass. It occurred to him that this whole thing was silly. He was Nathan Young, after all. _Immortal_. Why struggle like this when, if he drowned, he’d just come to a few hours later? He should just let it happen. It kind of sucked because he’d had a good streak of not dying for the last few years, but it was bound to happen at some point ...

He was pondering doing exactly that when a shockingly warm hand grabbed his arm and began to tug him. It took him a moment to realize what was happening, and by the time he did, he was already close enough to the shore that his legs were dragging against the sandy bottom. Barry was pulling him out.

When they got up onto the beach, Nathan leaned over, arms braced on this legs, and coughed and gagged. Someone put a towel around him -- it was Al. All the other roommates were clustered around them, looking anxious. And Barry was standing next to him, soaking wet, and he looked furious.

The others must have seen that, too, and so they quietly excused themselves and went back to their spot on the beach, leaving the two of them alone.

“What were you thinking?” Simon hissed.

“What was I thinking?” Nathan gasped, astonished, because now that he’d coughed up most of the sea water and could breath, he was thinking a lot more clearly, and something had just occurred to him. “ _What was I thinking?_ What were you thinking?! You could have drowned, you colossal dildo!”

“You _were_ drowning!”

Nathan waved his arms up and down wildly. “ _So?_ ” Simon gritted his teeth and looked like he was about to argue, so he pressed on. “Seriously, you idiot, have you forgotten I’m --” and he lowered his voice to a loud stage whisper, “ _immortal_?”

“I know that,” Barry said. “It doesn’t mean you should act like a reckless --”

“No, stop right there. What is wrong with you? You could have _actually_ drowned and not come back, for absolutely no good reason --”

“It _is_ a good reason!” Simon shouted, and a few of the beachgoers nearby turned and looked at them, so he lowered his voice. “Just because you can die and come back doesn’t mean you _should_. I don’t like it, don’t you get it?”

Nathan just looked at him. “You’re mental,” he muttered, “I don’t understand you.” And he really didn’t. What was the big deal? So he died. It was a bother, but he’d get over it. 

But Barry --

The thought chilled him to the bone, worse than the freezing cold of the ocean.

Simon was shaking his head and walking back to the blanket. After a moment, Nathan followed him silently.

  


There was an uncomfortable silence when they got back. Eventually, Emily stood up and announced she was getting ice cream, and Becca and Al jumped up eagerly to join her, clearly relieved to find an escape. They asked if they wanted anything, but Nathan and Simon shook their heads.

It was quiet for a few minutes after they left. Nathan was laying sprawled on his back, and Simon was sitting with his knees up, staring at the sea. All Nathan could see was his back, smooth and solid and strong. He could see the beautiful outlines of his musculature, the smooth bumps of his spine, could imagine the way all the parts of Simon fit together to make him, except that was just a body, a stupid meat carriage that would rot one day in the ground and turn to shit like everything else in Nathan’s life. The inevitable mortality of it all made him fucking sick.

“Barry,” he said, his voice hoarse. Simon’s muscles tensed, but he said nothing. “Barry,” he said again, a little louder. Still nothing. He placed his hand on Simon’s lower back. “Simon.”

He turned around, and his eyes were red-rimmed, because he was fucking crying, and Nathan felt like absolute garbage.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t be mad at me.”

Simon lowered himself down to lay next to him, put his arms around him, and squeezed him so tightly that Nathan let out a little gasp. “I’m not mad,” he said, his voice thick, “but you scare me sometimes.”

Nathan let his head loll until it rested against Simon’s, their sticky, salt-encrusted hair mingling together. “I scare myself sometimes, too,” he confessed.

“Don’t do things like that anymore.”

Nathan sucked in his breath. He wasn’t sure he could keep that promise, but he said, “All right,” anyway, just to give Barry some peace of mind. It was the least he deserved.

  


That night he dreamed of Simon drowning, the greenish-yellow water closing over his head and his pale body disappearing into the murky depths, leaving him on his own. When he woke up, he was sweating and his stomach was churning. He stumbled over Barry’s peacefully sleeping body and out of the bedroom, across the living room to the bathroom, where he just managed to flip up the toilet seat before he vomited a mixture of bile, sea water, and the pizza and beer he’d eaten for dinner.

When he was sure that it was over, he cleaned up and returned to the bedroom. Somehow, he hadn’t woken Simon. He was completely fine, breathing deeply, his face relaxed and sweet. He looked so fucking cute that Nathan wanted to kiss him, but he was worried he’d wake him up. Instead he grabbed his cigarettes and went outside.

It was early, light just beginning to peek over the buildings on their street. He couldn’t sit down, couldn’t sit still. He smoked and paced around in the front yard until he noticed loud hissing coming from the driveway between their house and the neighbor’s. Behind Becca’s car, he found the cat who’d approached him the other day and another one, a big, mangy orange tom, yowling and swiping. He rushed over and took a swing at it with his foot, not actually trying to connect with it, but just scare it, and it worked; the big cat darted away, hissed at him, and took off.

Nathan crouched down and contemplated the cat that was still partially huddled under Becca’s car. He felt faintly ridiculous, squatting here in the driveway in the pre-dawn, wearing only boxers and holding a half-smoked cigarette in one hand. He gestured to the cat. “C’mere.” The cat sniffed the air and stayed put, so he gave in and made some kissy noises, until it finally crept closer.

“Was that the fucker who took a chunk out of your ear?” he asked, stroking the cat’s smooth head, and then he took a chance and, shoving the cigarette in his mouth, picked the cat up. It didn’t resist, just let him do it, which cats didn’t usually do, he was pretty sure. He carried it over to the porch and sat down and put it in his lap, where it sat contentedly and purred. “You better not have fleas, you little cunt,” he muttered, but without rancor. The purring was very relaxing, along with the nicotine that had finally entered his system.

Behind him, the front door opened. “Nathan?” Simon said softly. “I woke up and you weren’t in bed.”

He waved the cigarette in the air. Simon crept over and sat down next to him on the porch. “Oh,” he said, his eyes wide. “Where’d the cat come from?”

“Found him scuffling with some ugly monster twice his size. I think he likes me.”

Simon put one hand out tentatively to pet him, but the cat twisted its head around instantly and hissed. He quickly withdrew.

“Huh,” Nathan said. “It doesn’t do that with me.”

Shaking his head, Simon stood up. “Are you going to come back to bed?”

“As soon as I finish smoking this.”

Simon leaned down and kissed his head. “I love you.”

Nathan smiled vaguely. “Love you, too.”

When he heard the door close behind him, he let out a big sigh. The cat stared back at him with oddly knowing eyes. He leaned back on hands and looked up at the brightening sky, and then he closed his eyes and whispered, “Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nathan and Barry's Guide to Boston
> 
> [Allston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allston): The neighborhood of Boston where the apartment is located (specifically, Lower Allston). 
> 
> [The Breakfast Club](https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-breakfast-club-allston): A diner in Lower Allston. It is indeed named after the John Hughes movie and is very 80s themed.
> 
> [The "T"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Bay_Transportation_Authority) and [CharlieCards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CharlieCard): Boston's transit system and pass system (which are about to be phased out this year for a system similar to London's, actually). CharlieCards are unironically named for a character in an anti-capitalist folk song railing against the MBTA, which is really just very Boston.
> 
> [Boston Public Garden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Garden_\(Boston\)): A park south of the Boston Common. And it's true, we have [lesbian swans named Romeo and Juliet.](http://archive.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/08/12/thou_art_no_romeo/)
> 
> [The North End](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_End,_Boston): Boston's Italian neighborhood. If you are local and wondering whether they went to Mike's Pastry or Modern Pastry for those cannoli, the answer is Mike's, because it is superior. Sorry Modern fans. (The cannoli battle rages on.)
> 
> [Hampton Beach, NH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Beach,_New_Hampshire): My favorite beach. Excellent arcade. Ironically, when I was googling Whitesnake while writing this, it turned out they are playing the Hampton Beach Casino in May, which I took as a sign from Fate that "Here I Go Again" should definitely appear in this chapter.
> 
> Also, the book that Nathan reads a bit of on the beach is [We Are the Ants](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23677341-we-are-the-ants) by Shaun David Hutchinson. It's an amazing book and I highly recommend it. tw: suicide, depression, homophobia, bullying, and sexual assault.


	3. Autumn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wHy iS tHIs sO LoNG :/

Nathan puffed on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes at his opponent. He was wiley, he’d give him that much. He kicked a nearby rock towards him. “Shoo, motherfucker,” he said.

The wild turkey standing in front of Becca’s car hissed at him and didn’t budge.

“Google says you have to exhibit dominance,” Emily called from where she was cowering on the porch. “Or throw something, like a tennis ball.”

“Do we have any tennis balls?” Becca said. She looked at her phone. “Fuck, I’m going to be late to this appointment.”

“Try whistling,” Emily suggested. “Or shouting, or clapping your hands.” She glared at the turkey, then shouted something at it in Mandarin. The turkey cocked its head at her. 

“Good idea,” Nathan said. “Hey, fuckstick!  _ Póg mo thóin! _ Oh, shit.” The turkey lunged at him, flapping its wings, and he stumbled backwards.

Suddenly, a loud piercing shriek filled the air. Confused, Nathan looked back at the porch. Simon was standing in the front doorway, holding his phone aloft, and the terrible noise was emanating from it.

Luckily, the turkey didn’t like it either. With an angry squawk, it hustled away down the driveway and down the road. 

“Thank  _ God _ ,” Becca muttered, scooping up her purse. Simon silenced his phone and she kissed him quickly on the cheek. “Thanks! Gotta go.” She dashed down the stairs, then paused and kissed Nathan on the cheek too. “Thanks for trying!” And then she got in her car and sped off. 

“Well, that was fun,” Emily said. “Fucking turkeys.”

“ _ Thanks for trying _ ,” Nathan said, dropping his cigarette on the ground and stomping it out. “That’s what I get for risking my life!”

Simon smiled at him as he walked across the yard, and gave him a proper kiss on the mouth. “You were very brave.”

“Oh, Barry,” Nathan whimpered, and mock swooned against his chest. “I was so scared. You’re such a hero.”

Simon rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I need to get going, too, I have class in a bit.” He nodded his head towards the messenger bag he had slung over his shoulder. 

“Oh.” Nathan straightened up. “I might go with you. Into the city, I mean.”

“Oh, sure.” They began to walk down the street, avoiding the flock of turkeys that had migrated to a neighbor’s yard. “Anything in particular you plan to do today?”

Nathan shrugged. “Just explore, you know, see what kind of mischief I can get up to.” 

That was largely what he’d been doing for the past few weeks, ever since Simon’s term had started up and the temperature had finally lowered to something slightly less punishing. Nearly every day, while Simon was busy at school or doing his coursework, he’d go out and roam aimlessly. First he’d explored the immediate vicinity of Lower Allston, walking around until he got lost and had to use the map on his phone to get back; or he’d borrow Al’s bike when he didn’t need it and branch out further, into Brighton and Brookline. Then he’d started mimicking Simon’s commute, walking down to catch the 66 bus across the river into Harvard Square, then the Red Line into downtown Boston; or he’d walk for thirty minutes all the way down to Packard’s Corner and catch the Green Line there. He didn’t really care which way he went, to be honest, so long as he was moving. He’d grown so sick of being alone in the apartment, even sick of sleeping all day, that just pretending he had something to do during the day was a welcome distraction. He reasoned to himself that he was just familiarizing himself with the city, getting to know it as well as he had known London, but there was something so incredibly pathetic about his rambles about the city while everyone else had meaningful stuff to fill their day that he couldn’t quite take himself seriously. 

Together, they boarded the bus. They sat in the back, in silence, as the bus crossed the Anderson Bridge. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. Nathan had discovered that, in Barry’s presence, he was capable of being quiet, that the usual nagging itch to fill the emptiness with jokes and rude comments and bragging wasn’t as strong. He could just be.

At Harvard Square they got off the bus, and then walked around the edge of the Harvard Yard to the Red Line stop. In the square, a one man band was playing “Free Bird”; he was decked out in all kinds of colorful horns and trumpets and bells and cymbals attached to his clothing. Nathan gaped at him, but Simon steered him away a little warily and they descended down the stairs into the station. 

When they reached Park Street, they said goodbye, and Simon headed off down the tunnel that connected to the Orange Line Downtown Crossing stop, while Nathan climbed up to where the station exited into Boston Common. And then he tried to decide what to do with himself.

He ended up wandering around the Common for awhile, watching people take their dogs for walks, and kids playing in the now-emptied basin of the Frog Pond, the homeless people trying to sleep at the base of the Boston Massacre memorial. He spent about half an hour drinking a weak cup of crappy American tea (no wonder they’d thrown it all in the Harbor) and watching a woman feed nuts to a group of squirrels; she’d given each one a name, Beatrice and Gertrude and Ebenezer, that sort of thing. 

_ That’ll be me soon _ , he thought _ , just some wacko who talks to squirrels all day _ . He took out his phone and WhatsApped with Kelly for a bit. She was having some kind of problem with her boyfriend, whose name he couldn’t even remember; Scott or Seth or something. 

_ How are you doin _ she messaged after venting for a long time. There was a pause and then  _ i miss you _ .

He smirked.  _ Too late youve lost your chance. _

_ Oh ha fuckin ha _ .  _ Really though what are you lot up to? _

He lit up another cigarette and thought about what to say. Generally Kelly could be trusted, after all, she’d read embarrassing shit in his mind loads of time and rarely spilled the beans. But it was one thing to have her raid his subconscious and another thing to actually vocalize (or type, he supposed) what was on his mind.

_ Barry’s doing great, they say he’s going to be the next spielberg  _ he wrote, and left it at that. 

But Kelly wasn’t going to be deterred.  _ And you? _

His thumb hovered over the keys. He was frozen like that for so long, caught in some sort of internal battle, that when the phone started buzzing in his hand he nearly dropped it. It was Kelly, calling him through the app.

Reluctantly, he answered. “Well, hello, sexy.”

“What’s goin’ on?” she asked, sounding a little irritated. “I’m not stupid, you know, I can tell when somethin’s botherin’ ya.”

“You can’t read my mind through international calling, you know.”

“I’m not trying to, I’m askin’ you to speak to me and tell me what you’re thinkin’.”

Nathan let out a long breath. “Do I have to?”

“ _ Nathan _ . If you don’t start talkin’, I’m gonna ask Simon.”

“Fine, fine,” he said. “I don’t know, I’m just sort of … aimless.”

“There’s nothing for you to do. Thought you’d love that.”

“I guess.” He bit his lip. 

“What else?”

He didn’t intend to say much of anything. He hemmed and hawed and made a few generalities, and then before he knew it, suddenly all sorts of things he’d meant to keep to himself came tumbling out: the loneliness, the emptiness, the long stupid days, his general feeling of being pretty worthless, etc. Except not in such succinct terms. 

When he finally stuttered to a conclusion, Kelly was quiet, and he was wondering why in the hell he’d just confessed all of that. Maybe Kelly had some power he didn’t know about, the power to make people spill their pathetic, snivelling guts, even from an ocean’s length away.

Finally, Kelly said, a little gently, “Mate, it sounds to me like you’re depressed.”

He laughed. “Now you’re talking crazy, Kell. Me? Depressed?”

“You should really talk to Simon.”

He made a noncommittal noise.

“Nathan, I’m serious.”

“Well, this has been an interesting chat, Kelly, very informative for you, I’m sure, but I’m afraid I’ve got to go. I have important shit to attend to.”

“Nathan!”

“Talk to you later, love you, bye,” he said quickly, and terminated the call. Then he let out a long shaky breath and checked the time. It was half past five. Somehow, the entire day had floated by, filled largely with nothing. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast except an  _ arepa _ and this awful tea. He decided to text Simon and find out what he was doing.

_ Working on my project in the media lab _ , was the reply.  _ I might be here late _ .

A little pang of loneliness echoed in his chest, then shrivelled up and crumbled away.  _ Want a visitor? _ He asked.  _ I’ll be quiet and good i promise _ .

He held his breath while he waited for Simon to reply, but when the text appeared he let it out in a big gush of relief.  _ Sure,  _ it said. _ I miss you anyway _ , followed by directions.

About forty minutes later, he tiptoed into the lab and found the cubicle that Simon was holed up in. “Surprise,” he said, brandishing a paper bag from Shake Shack. “I figured you hadn’t eaten anything yet, you weird workaholic.”

Simon grinned. “You know me very well.” 

Nathan smiled smugly and grabbed a chair from an empty cubicle and sat down and together they ate burgers and Simon showed him what he was working on, which was actually pretty cool, even though he didn’t understand half the terms Simon floated around. He felt content, like he was a part of something -- a relationship. He could be the person who showed up and reminded Barry that he needed to eat and take breaks and have real conversations, if nothing else.

“Is this your husband?” a voice whispered. A woman with curly black hair and pale skin was peeking her head around the partition. “He brought you a  _ burger _ ? Wow, watch out, I might steal him.”

Simon introduced her as Megan, one of the other members of his cohort, and they chatted for a few minutes. “Simon’s always talking about you,” she said, which made Nathan feel important and proud, and a little curious and worried, too, about what Simon said about him -- it always seemed these sorts of people wanted to ask you “what you did” and if you didn’t do  _ anything _ they didn’t know what to say. Did Simon complain about him, or mention that he was worried, or ask for advice? He fucking hoped not. 

Eventually Megan excused herself, and Nathan said, a little forlornly, “I guess you need to get back to work.”

Simon looked at his computer, then back at Nathan, and said, “It’s fine, I think I’m done for the day. Let’s go home.”

Nathan grinned. 

The whole way back, he felt a little bit like he was floating on air. The sun was setting, the city looked beautiful, Simon was walking next to him, and there was a warm, giddy, glowing feeling that pulsed beneath his breastbone. Everything was fine. He wasn’t depressed, just a little down earlier. How could he be depressed when he felt this happy?

  
  


Of course, it didn’t last.

He tried to find ways to fill his days. He did all the stupid chores he’d always hated, because he was around all the time, so why shouldn’t he? When something went wrong in the apartment, like when the sink started leaking, he looked up how to fix it on YouTube and did it, and everyone jokingly called him the Handy Man. He tried to cook. (Tried.) He fed tuna to the stray cat that hung around their neighborhood and, when no one was around to hear, had long one-sided conversations with it. He tried not to bother Simon too much and he ignored Kelly’s messages and hoped she wouldn’t rat him out.

He wandered. He wandered through Chinatown and the Theater District and Beacon Hill and the South End and Government Center, where he felt strangely at home, surrounded by enormous concrete, Brutalist monstrosities. He walked along the Esplanade and stared for hours out at the Charles River, where swotty posh people went rowing and cruised by on sailboats.

It was getting colder and the leaves were starting to turn golden, and he wondered what the hell he was going to do when winter came and walking around like this became really unpleasant. It was beautiful, the autumn, he supposed. Everyone said it was. He could appreciate it in a removed sort of way, but increasingly it was like he was viewing everything through a grainy film projector, like the weird arthouse films that Simon loved and would sometimes drag him to see at tiny movie houses. The positive side of this foggy-headedness was that everything sort of felt less important, less painful. The negative side was everything else. It was so different from his old sense of imperviousness, the surety that nothing could hurt him. That had made him feel strong. He didn’t feel strong now, but strangely weak, like a slowly fading shadow.

Simon could tell that something was off with him, but his attempts to get Nathan to talk about it were easy to shrug off.  _ He can’t know _ , he thought,  _ don’t fuck everything up, you idiot _ . Pretending to be himself just made him even more exhausted and spiritless when he was alone, though.

And then, one day, while he was aimlessly wandering around Copley Square, something awful happened.

He became aware that there was a cluster of people across the street, in front of the Copley Plaza Hotel, and more people were hastening to join them, or if they weren’t, they were standing in huddled groups, whispering. He made his way over, not really curious, but not having anything better to do. He listened to the chatter.

“What happened?”

“A jumper.”

“No way …”

“Somebody jumped off the roof of the hotel!”

“Fuck, why is everybody looking at it? Let’s get out of here.”

In the distance, an ambulance wailed, getting steadily closer.

Nathan experienced something he could only assume was like vertigo. The world shifted, abruptly, though he remained completely still, and he was remembering a different day, a different roof, a different sky spinning wildly as he tumbled, helplessly, to his death. The piercing, sudden pain in his chest, then nothingness, darkness, an expanse of time. And then a darkness of a different quality, close and tight and moist, the sliminess of the satin lining of a coffin, the pressing weight of all that earth on top of him, the hollow sound his fists made when he thumped them against the lid.

He became aware that he had staggered away, was bending over and breathing raggedly, heavily. People were eyeing him warily, giving him a wide berth. He hadn’t bothered to shave today, he had to look like a wildman right now, eyes wide and bulging as he tried to catch his breath.

“Fuck,” he gasped, “get your shit together.” 

But he wasn’t getting together. His mind was racing wildly. He didn’t know why he was reacting this way. He hadn’t even seen the body, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen -- or experienced -- worse. He’d died multiple times, in a variety of horrifying ways, he’d buried three corpses -- one of them created by his own husband! This was nothing. But all he could think about was the mechanics of the entire thing, the simultaneous feeling of weightlessness and crushing gravity, the sudden end. The inevitable awakening.

He stumbled forwards until he found a raised stone surface to sit against, and then he drew his legs up and put his head between his knees and tried hard to breathe. He tasted salt and wondered if he’d bitten his lip and it was blood, but when he felt at his mouth nothing came away but clear liquid, and that was when he realized he had started crying. But not crying, he wasn’t sobbing or anything, just sort of steadily leaking, some weird, mysterious action of his body that he didn’t have any control over. His hands were shaking uncontrollably. It was as if his body had detected  _ something _ was wrong and was just freaking out, like a broken computer, throwing random physical symptoms at him to get him to pay attention.

He leaned his head back against the stone and let it loll to the side, taking in big gulps of air and trying to calm himself. His eyes settled on words that were carved into the monument he was slumped against, and he tried to focus on them, something concrete and real. At first he couldn’t make sense out of any of it, which was terrifying, but the letters slowly coalesced into something recognizable.  _ It was in my heart to help a little, because I was helped much _ .

Help. 

Help.

He probably needed help. 

He took out his phone, gripping it tightly out of fear he’d drop it, and unlocked it with shaking hands. He couldn’t bring himself to bother Barry. Instead, he opened WhatsApp and clicked on Kelly’s name. 

The phone rang for what seemed like forever.  _ Please pick up, please pick up _ , he thought, and just when he thought she wouldn’t, the ringing abruptly stopped and he heard Kelly’s sleepy voice: “Nathan?”

He wondered what time it was there. It was already getting kind of dark here, it must be late, but he couldn’t manage to do the math. “Hey,” he manage to say, his voice distant and rough.

“What’s wrong?” she said sharply. “Nathan, are you all right?”

It took him a moment for him to get it out. “I don’t think so.”

“Are you crying?”

“I can’t breathe,” he gasped, “I’m a fucking mess, Kelly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I think you’re havin’ a panic attack,” she said. “Where’s Simon?”

“At school,” he said, and then thought of the time, “or maybe he’s home by now.”

“And where are you?”

“Copley Square,” he said, knowing that would mean nothing to her, “in the city. Somebody just offed themself by jumping off the roof of a hotel here.”

“ _ What _ ?”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, lamely, and rested his head against his knees and shuddered.

“Are you safe?” Kelly was saying.

“What do you mean?” he said. He didn’t feel very safe, he felt like he was dying or something, that’s why he was calling her.

“Are you --” Kelly seemed to be having a hard time getting it out, “you’re not going to, um … hurt yourself, are you?”

“Kelly, I’m immortal,” he said, exasperated.

“That’s besides the point.” She let out a shaky breath, and he realized just how scary this whole thing must be for her, all the way across the ocean with her nutty friend panting down the phone at her from a strange city. “I’m messaging Simon.”

“No!” he said. “No, no, no, you can’t.”

“Nathan, he needs to come get you. You need help.”

“I don’t want him to know.” His voice was high and whiny, and he hated it. “Please, Kel, don’t, he can’t know, I don’t want him to see me like this.”

“Oh, Nathan.” There was silence, and he knew she was typing out a message. “I’m sorry, I have to do it.”

At that, he really did start to cry, because he just felt so fucking ashamed. 

“He said he’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” Kelly was saying. “One of your flatmates is gonna drive him.”

“Fuck,” he said, and the word came out all snotty and thick. “Fuck, I don’t want Becca to come,  _ fuck _ .” 

“It’s going to be all right,” Kelly said. “Don’t worry about it. He asked where you are specifically, try to describe it.”

He told her he was across the street from the library, on the sidewalk near some kind of monument, and she relayed that to Simon, and then she kept talking to him for the whole twenty minutes until he saw Becca’s familiar rusty old car pull up on the side of Dartmouth Street and its emergency brake lights turn on. The passenger side door opened and Barry jumped out and ran over to him.

“He’s here,” Nathan said to Kelly, and then Barry was there, putting his arms around him and saying his name. He took the phone away and said a few words of thanks to Kelly, and then hung it up.

“Can you stand?” he asked. Nathan wasn’t sure, but he tried, and with Simon’s help he got to his feet and they walked slowly over to the car and got in the back seat together.

“Hi, Nathan,” Becca said gently, her eyes worried in the rearview mirror.

“I’m sorry,” he croaked, and put his head in his hands.

  
  


It was completely dark when they got home. Emily and Al were both sitting in the living room and jumped up when they entered.

“We didn’t know what to do,” Emily said, “so we made a lot of tea.” She gestured to the kitchen table, which had about three different tea pots on it.

“Thanks,” Simon said. He had one arm around Nathan’s shoulder. Nathan couldn’t bring himself to even look at them. He was silent as he was steered into their bedroom, as Simon took off his jacket and his shoes and put him in the bed. He laid there with his eyes closed, wishing he had Barry’s power and could just turn invisible, until he heard the sound of a cup being placed on the bedside table and a cool, wet towel rubbed at his tacky, tear-stained face. 

The bed shifted beneath Barry’s weight as he laid down next to him. Tentatively, Nathan opened his eyes. It was mostly dark in the room, only Simon’s desk lamp illuminating it.

“Try drinking some tea,” Simon said. 

Nathan sat up a little, picked up the cup, and took a sip. “Not bad,” he said, trying for nonchalance, but his voice was scratchy as though he’d been shouting.

“Well, there’s lots where that came from,” Barry said. He swallowed audibly. It was only in that moment that his stoic, forcibly calm expression faltered for a moment, and Nathan could see just how scared he was. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

He closed his eyes. “Didn’t Kelly already tell you?”

“She said you were having a panic attack,” Simon said, evenly. “She also said you’d told her before that you were feeling depressed.”

“ _ I _ didn’t say that,” he said, unable to suppress the bitterness in his voice. “She did. I never used the word  _ depressed _ .”

“Nathan,” Simon said, a little warily.

“I’m not depressed,” he insisted.

“It’s okay to be vulnerable sometimes, you know.”

Nathan snorted.

Simon sighed and switched tracks. “She told me about the jumper, too, said that it seemed to set your panic attack off.”

A flash of revolving sky and zooming pavement obscured his vision. He put the cup of tea down before he spilled it. “It just made me think of …” his voice trailed off and then, “you know, the community centre roof.”

“Oh.” Simon was silent for a moment, processing this, and then he reached and took Nathan’s hand, stroking it gently. “Do you think about that a lot?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He shook his head.

Simon’s hand squeezed his. “I think … I think you should see someone.”

Nathan’s whole body tensed. “Why? Because you think I’m a fucking mental case?”

“Nathan, think about who you’re talking to for a moment.”

He turned and looked at Simon for a moment. In so many ways, he looked so different than the Barry he’d met seven years before. Long gone was the rigidly parted and smoothed down hair; right now it was particularly messy, and his jaw was unshaven. He was older, too, and there were laugh lines at the corners of his mouth and more color in his cheeks. 

But despite all these differences, this person that he’d married, his husband, was still the weird kid who’d been sectioned in a mental institution for weeks and who Nathan himself had eagerly branded as “mental” within days of knowing him. 

Oh, the irony.

“It’s not going to work,” he said. “Don’t you get it? I mean, what exactly am I going to tell a therapist? Oh, doctor, I died in a really fucked up way, then woke up in my coffin because it turns out I’m immortal, and sometimes I have bad dreams about it?”

“I know it won’t be easy,” Simon said, “I know there will be things you can’t talk about. But I think there’s other things that are bothering you that can talk about, aren’t there? What you’re going through now. And I know you didn’t have … well, the easiest childhood …”

“No.” He shut his eyes. “I’m not … I’m not going to do that.”

There was a long gulf of silence between them, and Nathan was suddenly preoccupied with a terror that when he opened his eyes, Simon would be gone. But when he did, Simon was still there, biting his lip and looking at him with concern.

“Why don’t we talk about it in the morning,” Simon said at last. 

“Sure,” he replied, and thought,  _ well, that’s not happening _ .

They went about the mechanics of getting ready for bed without speaking. When they were finally under the covers and the lights were out, Simon reached out and stroked his face. Nathan stiffened for a moment, then forced himself to relax.  _ It’s Barry, just Barry, and he loves you, and he’s just trying to help, even if it feels like everything is an attack right now, don’t fucking ruin this, too _ .

“You know how precious you are to me, don’t you?” Barry whispered in the dark.

A heaviness filled his chest, something like guilt, taking his breath away. He shrugged.

“You are,” Barry said, and his voice shook a little. “You’re very, very important, Nathan.” He pulled Nathan close and buried his face in his neck and held him as though he was afraid he might vanish at any moment.

  
  


Nathan fell asleep surprisingly quickly, but when he woke up it was still dark out. He lay in bed, listening to the peaceful sound of Simon sleeping, cars driving past the window, Canada geese honking in the distance, and gradually remembered everything that had happened.

_ Barry knows _ , he thought, and then,  _ he probably thinks I want to top myself _ . How embarrassing. And stupid -- he couldn’t do it, even if he wanted to, he’d just come back.

Well, unless he took some drugs and reversed his powers.

The thought hit him like a smack to the face.  _ Oh yeah _ , he thought, and suddenly the entire thing was laid out in his mind, how he would go about it, and where he could do it so that Barry wouldn’t have to find the body, and …

“Oh, shit,” he muttered aloud, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.  _ Shit shit shit _ , he thought,  _ okay, maybe I am a little suicidal _ . Had it really gotten that bad? How could he even think about doing that to Barry?  _ Look at how he reacted last night, he’d be a fucking mess, he needs you _ . But at the same time, he’d probably be better off without him, wouldn’t he? Without Fuck Up Nathan ruining his life and leeching off him -- after all, he’d never be able to really contribute anything meaningful to the relationship, he’d always be a burden, Simon’s embarrassing husband, the same way he’d been an embarrassing boyfriend who could only get a job sorting bottles at the recycling center and all of Barry’s old schoolmates back at uni never knew what to say to him when they came around to study at the flat …

_ Oh God _ , he thought, closing his eyes tightly, and wondered how the hell this had happened. This wasn’t what he’d thought being suicidal might be like, he’d have imagined it was some sort of melodramatic single-minded fixation, but instead it was like an awful, shitty unending conversation with an incredibly dull asshole who just kept pointing out what a piece of garbage he, Nathan Young, actually was, except that asshole was himself.

He was scared. And he lay in bed, feeling scared like that, until Simon finally woke up, yawned, rolled over onto his back. And then Nathan turned to him and said, “Okay, I’ll go.”

Simon looked at him, confused, and so he clarified, “I”ll go see a therapist.”

The relief that washed over Barry’s face made him feel, if anything, worse, because there was still that little voice in his head telling him that by doing what Barry wanted he was probably just making it worse for him in the long run. “Thank you,” Simon said. “Thank you, Nathan. It’s going to be all right, you’ll see. I’ll help you.”

He hoped Barry was right.

  
  


Therapy sucked, which was about what he had expected.

Once a week he took a bus to Oak Hill in Brighton and climbed the stairs above a tattoo parlor where his therapist’s office was located. The waiting room was all muted colors and abstract art and little potted succulents and shit. The first time he walked in, he wanted to turn around and leave, and only the thought of Barry’s disappointment and worry kept him from doing just that.

The therapist herself he didn’t mind, he guessed. He hadn’t been going long enough to form a real opinion. The first few weeks were mostly spent with her slowly tugging from him his complicated personal history, carefully scrubbed of any mention of superpowers, being buried alive, or helping to dispose of dead probation workers. They talked about his parents, and his bad relationship with his dad, and his various ways of driving off his mother’s boyfriends. When they discussed his less than stellar educational history, he mentioned that in school they’d recommended he be tested for ADHD but his father -- this had been when his parents were still together -- had adamantly refused, something about overmedicating kids and boys will be boys and all of that shit. 

The therapist had said that maybe he should consider being tested now.

“What’s the point,” Nathan said. “I’m nearly thirty years old, I’ve managed this long, haven’t I?” Well, “managed” was perhaps exaggerating a bit.

“ADHD and depression often co-occur,” Dr. Chambers said. “Basically, untreated ADHD can create the right conditions for depression and anxiety to take root.”

“Oh good, another thing I can blame dear old Dad for.”

“You don’t have to decide to do it now, but if you do want to, let me know, and I’ll refer you to a specialist.”

At the first appointment, she’d written him a prescription for an anti-depressant. “Try it out,” she said. “This might not be the right one for you, and it takes a few weeks before they start to work. The side effects can be difficult during the adjustment period, but if they are too extreme or you don’t start seeing any positive benefits by November, we can try a different drug.”

He hadn’t wanted to even fill it. What if it didn’t make anything better? What if it made him feel worse? What if it made him feel like a zombie, or he forgot how to be himself? Not that he was much like himself lately, anyway. And he’d promised Simon he would try. So he got the damn pills. And then he spent a few days glaring at the bottle and not taking them. Simon noticed, but didn’t say anything. Nathan hated how he was treating him as though he were some kind of delicate creature, like he was breakable, when nothing could be further from the truth, and that was half his problem.

He told Simon that as they lay in bed in the early morning one day that first week, before Simon had to leave for class. “It’s all a bunch of theater, isn’t it? I’m immortal, none of it really matters.” He couldn’t bring himself to mention the power reversal thing to Barry. He was ashamed of himself for even thinking about it. He never wanted Barry to know it had occurred to him.

(Another thing Dr. Chambers had asked him during that first appointment was, “Did you have a plan?” He’d understood instantly that she meant a plan to kill himself. And he had, sort of, so he told her that. “I don’t want to do it though,” he’d muttered, “I’m not going to do it, so don’t call the police or lock me up or whatever.”)

But Simon didn’t know about that. “It does matter,” Simon said. “You’re still suffering.”

Nathan found the word  _ suffering _ a little too extreme for what he was experiencing -- he preferred to call it “just feeling generally like a piece of garbage” and “suffering” seemed to grant too much dignity to the whole process -- and said as much.

“I wonder if the immortality thing has warped your perception of what it means to hurt,” Simon said. “It’s like your concept of pain is just so far removed from everyone else’s now, that you can’t really recognize when you’re in danger anymore.”

Nathan didn’t like this, but he didn’t say anything, because it would have all just come out sarcastic and mean and he was still too exhausted to be like that, especially to Simon, who was just trying to help him.

“Remember my old theory about our powers?”

Nathan rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, that it’s some kind of manifestation of our ego or whatever --”

“Super-ego, not the ego. The super-ego is like our inner critic, remember, that tries to make us act in socially acceptable --”

“Right, right, whatever. Anyway, the fact that you’re invisible is because of your terminably crippling shyness and Alisha’s power was because she was afraid of real intimacy and Curtis, well, he wanted to turn back time and fix all of his mistakes, and Kelly was self-conscious about what people thought about her --”

“And you’re immortal because you don’t want to be hurt anymore.”

Nathan waved his hand in irritation. “Anyway, we’ve been over this before, what’s your point?”

Simon took a deep breath. “My point is … I don’t know if I can turn invisible anymore.”

Nathan froze. “What?”

“I hadn’t tried in a really long time -- years, I guess. I just … hadn’t needed to do it. And a few months ago -- right before we moved, actually -- I tried it. And I … I couldn’t figure out how to do it.”

Nathan sat up on the bed. “You lost your power?”

“Maybe, maybe not. It might be that if I really, really needed it, I could do it, but …” Simon let out a tense breath. “I guess right now I don’t feel like I need to be invisible anymore.”

Nathan looked down at his hands. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I wasn’t sure if it really meant anything.”

“Do you think I might lose my power, too?”

Simon was silent for a moment, and his thoughts were so transparent on his face that Nathan felt like he could read his mind, just like Kelly. Simon was hoping that Nathan wouldn’t lose his power because then he’d have to worry about him even more. “I don’t know.”

After that, Simon had to get ready to leave, and Nathan lay in bed, cracking his knuckles over and over and thinking. If Simon didn’t need to turn invisible anymore, and his whole crackpot theory was right, then that meant -- what? That he’d grown past all of his trauma or whatever? Unlike Nathan, who was still stuck. 

He sat up and dug around in his nightstand until he found the bottle of anti-depressants. He  turned it over in his hands a few times and read the label; opened the bottle and stared at the pills. Then he shrugged, and took one.

He didn’t say anything to Simon about starting the medication, and Simon didn’t notice until a few days later when Nathan took his dose while he got ready for bed. “Oh,” he said. “How are they working?”

Nathan shrugged. “Fine, I guess.” He hadn’t noticed any improvement so far, but he also hadn’t had many side effects, except some difficulty sleeping at first; when he’d seen Dr. Chambers the day before she’d suggested taking them at night instead, which seemed to work.

“Great.” Simon smiled and leaned in to kiss him. “I’m proud of you.”

Nathan rolled his eyes and pushed him away. “It’s not a big deal,” he muttered. “They probably won’t work on me anyway.”

Except about a week later, while he was sitting and watching  _ Drag Race _ with Becca (their near-daily ritual -- they were almost to the end of season seven) and one minute he was laughing so hard he was nearly crying and the next he was actually crying and had no idea why.

“What the fuck?” he muttered, scrubbing at his face while Becca ran to get him tissues, “What the actual fuck?”

“That can happen,” Dr. Chambers said when he called her on the phone. “The medicine is basically trying to reconfigure your brain chemistry to normal levels, and it takes awhile to get it right.”

“Well, I fucking hate it,” he said.

“Do you want to stop and try something else?”   
  


“It’s not going to last forever, is it?”

“It shouldn’t, and if it doesn’t stop soon, we’ll definitely switch.”

He decided to stick it out.

  
  


He spent a lot of time sitting on the porch with the stray cat. It took up the space that had formerly been filled by his walks around the city, which he hadn’t done since the whole nervous breakdown in public thing had happened. So instead, he’d sit in an old camp chair that he’d found under the porch, with the cat on his lap, purring away like a fucking motor engine, and he’d smoke and fuck around on his phone or sometimes nod off. Sometimes he tried to read, even, Becca’s or Simon’s books, but he couldn’t concentrate for very long, which made him wonder if Dr. Chambers was on to something about the whole ADHD thing.

He was sitting out there like that, the cat kneading his thighs, when Alberto stepped out of the house and sat down on the stairs and took out a cigarette. He wasn’t surprised to see him; Al was the only other person in the apartment who also smoked, so they’d spent a number of mostly silent smoke breaks out on the porch. But he didn’t know Al very well, except for the fact that he was a musician and an international student from Puerto Rico, and that he was shy. Simon got along with him better, the only two introverts in a house of loud, shouty people. 

So he was surprised when Al suddenly said, “Hey, Nathan. Can I talk to you?”

Nathan furrowed his brows. “Go ahead. Hit me.”

Al looked down at the ground. “I just wanted to tell you that … well, I have depression, too. And anxiety. And I take medication for it.”

Whatever Nathan had been expecting -- a declaration of love? A request for Simon and Nathan to fuck more quietly? -- it hadn’t been this. “Oh.” 

“How are you doing?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I guess.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Every once in awhile I cry like a motherbitch at absolutely nothing, and yesterday Barry spilled a box of pasta on the floor and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my entire life, but other than that, I guess I feel fine.” 

Al smiled. “That sounds about right.”

They sat in silence for a bit, and then Nathan asked, “Does it actually work? Like, does it actually get better?”

Al nodded. “Sure,” he said, “though I think better means different things to different people, and it can take awhile to get there. And there are still bad days.”

Nathan wasn’t quite sure what “better” meant to him. Objectively, he supposed he felt better at that moment than he had two or three weeks before, but did he feel “normal”? What even was normal, for him? And was it good enough?

He didn’t know.

  
  


Their first wedding anniversary fell on the day before Thanksgiving, and, handily, all of their roommates were leaving for the entire weekend. Becca was going to stay with her girlfriend’s family in California; Alberto was visiting an aunt and uncle who lived in New York; and Emily’s family only lived about half an hour away in Quincy, but she was planning to stay with them until Sunday. “To give you two some privacy,” she said, winking, and Barry turned beet red and Nathan told Emily she was the greatest wingman of all time.

When the last of them had cleared out late on Wednesday afternoon, the two of them looked each other for a minute, grinning, and then Nathan ran, yelling, into their bedroom, shucking clothes as he went, while Simon followed, bashful but no less willing. 

“Get over here,” Nathan said, “get that shit off,” and he stripped Simon as quickly as he could, but drew up short. “Hey, where’d you get these scratches?” There were reddish, irritated looking scrapes along both his arms.

“Oh, huh,” Simon said quickly, “I hadn’t noticed that, don’t know.” And before Nathan could ask any further, he pushed him down on to the bed and distracted him thoroughly.

The best part was, Nathan was feeling great. He’d seemed to achieve some kind of equilibrium at last, and the fact that he had Barry all to himself for almost five full days was a huge boon to his mood, too. Not to mention the fact that they could be as loud as they wanted. (“Well, there’s still the downstairs neighbors,” Simon worried at one point, but then Nathan did something with his hips that made him shout and he didn’t bring up the neighbors again after that.)

Afterwards, Nathan had a long, luxurious nap, woken only briefly at one point to see Simon fully dressed and creeping quietly out the door. “Where’re you goin’?” he asked, and Simon looked startled and said, “Just running out to get some lunch, go back to sleep,” and he did.

When he woke up again, it was to the sensation of delicate touches along his face, and then a rough tongue licking him. He opened his eyes and was subject to an extremely close up view of a cat’s face. And not just any cat -- it was the stray cat, the one he’d sort of vaguely come to think of as  _ his  _ cat.

“What are you doing here?” he murmured, sitting up and scratching the cat under its chin. It was then that he noticed Simon sitting on the edge of the bed, smiling. “What’s going on?”

“She’s yours.”

“What?” He blinked.

“Emily and I caught her and brought her in to the vet yesterday, and now she’s got all her shots and flea treatment and everything. She’s yours. Happy anniversary.”

“What?” He was still stunned. All he could think of to say was, “I thought we weren’t doing presents.” Barry laughed, and Nathan looked at the cat that was currently rubbing her face aggressively against his hand. “So it’s a she, huh?” he murmured. “And that explains the scratches.”

“I don’t think she likes me much,” Simon said. 

“She just likes to play hard to get, that’s all,” Nathan grinned.

“What are you going to name her?”

He shrugged. 

“Well, think about it.”

So he did. And when everyone came back on Sunday, eager and delighted to see his reaction to the cat, he was ready: “Her name is … Asbo!”

Barry burst out laughing, while the other three looked at him in confusion.

“What is  _ asbo _ ?” Al asked, “I don’t know that word.”

“Anti-social behavior order!” Nathan said cheerfully. “Barry and I had ‘em, back when we were juvenile delinquents.”

“It’s very fitting,” Simon said, rubbing at the cat scratches on his arms, “very fitting indeed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Barry and Nathan's Guide to Boston
> 
> If you are not blessed to be from an area beset by wild turkeys, they really are kind of a menace. [Here's a bunch of cops trying to wrangle a gang of them near Boston](https://youtu.be/RhfQqDfNzHA) (which just makes me think of that scene with the swan in Hot Fuzz).
> 
> The one man band (Ramblin' Dan) is [real](https://youtu.be/hn_Pe0cPRyk). So is the squirrel lady.
> 
> [Government Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Center,_Boston) is where City Hall is. It used to be an immigrant neighborhood called the West End/Scollay Square, but it got bulldozed in the 60s and turned into an ugly concrete jungle in the Brutalist style. That's also the style of filming location for the community centre in Misfits ([which was also a filming location for A Clockwork Orange](https://lwlies.com/articles/a-clockwork-orange-brutalist-tower-blocks-thamesmead/)).
> 
> [Copley Square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copley_Square) is the site of the Boston Public Library, Trinity Church, Old South Church, and the Boston Marathon Finish Line. The monument mentioned in the story is the [Khalil Gibran memorial](http://bostonlitdistrict.org/venue/khalil-gibran-memorial/).


	4. Winter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this chapter took awhile! Besides me getting distracted by other stories, I was stuck on one bit for awhile, and eventually I had to do some deleting and rewrite the scene in a different way. And then it worked!

“And the Haunt is … number 41, Invisible Traitor.” Becca closed the book and handed it to Simon. “Go in your bedroom and read this, and do _not_ listen to us!”

Sheepishly, Simon did as he was told. As soon as the door closed, Nathan sat back and put his arms behind his head. “So, how do we kill him?”

“So brutal! I thought you loved him,” Emily said, smacking him in the arm.

“Hey, that’s how the game is played,” Nathan said. “I didn’t make the rules, sweetheart.”

“Shut up and let me read our instructions,” said Agnes, Becca’s girlfriend. She cleared her throat. “The traitor has turned invisible and has decided to kill you all…”

“You didn’t read the flavor text!” Becca groaned. “You always skip it. Let me see that.”

As she read out loud to them about the invisible traitor they would soon be fighting, Nathan leaned back and stared out the window. The outside world was nothing but pure whiteness, thanks to the blizzard that currently had them trapped inside the apartment. Asbo was curled up on the back of an armchair that was stationed just in front of the window, peering out into the storm, and Nathan imagined where she’d be right now if she hadn’t been forced, mostly against her will, to become a well-cared-for housecat. Probably freezing all six of her tits off.

“Nathan, pay attention, we’re strategizing,” Emily said. “Look, you have the spirit board, so you can try to exorcise him …”

The funny thing was, if the invisible traitor really wanted to, he could maybe turn invisible and creep in here and spy on them and learn their entire strategy. Of course, Simon would probably never do that, being someone who respected rules (at least as they pertained to board games; not always so much in regards to arson, murder, and disposal of human remains, but that was all in the past). Plus there was the whole thing with him not being able to turn invisible anymore.

“Okay, I think we’re ready,” Agnes said, and Becca shouted, “Simon! Come back in!”

Barry returned to the room with the book and a sheet of paper he’d written something in. As he took his seat again, Nathan casually leaned his head against his shoulder. “I love you,” he said sweetly, and craned his head to look at the paper.

“Get off!” Tilting the paper away, Simon leaned so far away that Nathan nearly fell onto the floor, laughing.

“No cheating,” Becca said firmly.

“I’m just _strategizing_!” Nathan protested. He pointed at Barry. “We are going to wipe the floor with you, Invisible Boy.”

Simon smirked, and they resumed the game.

  


“I still can’t believe you won, you conniving bastard,” Nathan complained. He was sprawled out on his stomach on their bed, the wind howling outside. Asbo, who had been running around the apartment like an absolute nutter for the last fifteen minutes, jumped onto the bed, crawled onto his back, and settled in.

“That’s me,” Simon said in a monotone. “Very conniving.” He closed the door. After they’d finished the game (and Nathan and Al had braved the blizzard for a brief cigarette break on the porch), they’d spent the rest of the afternoon watching _Sense8_ , which was just the latest in a series of a science fiction shows -- starting, of course, with _Battlestar Galactica_ \-- that Barry had convinced Nathan to watch with him, and that he’d wound up liking for all the wrong reasons. (In the case of _Sense8_ : “So many orgies!”) Then they ate some disgusting/delicious concoction called Mississippi Roast that Becca had made in a crock pot (“As the resident yeehaw” -- Becca was from Texas -- “of this household, I feel it’s my duty to expose you all to this shit.”).

And now it was dark and still snowing and Nathan felt sleepy and mostly content, which was about as good as it could get. He idly checked his phone, saw there was a missed WhatsApp call from his mother, and frowned.

“What’s wrong?” Simon asked, reaching over to stroke Nathan’s cheek -- a little warily, probably because Asbo was giving him her best _stay away from my human_ look.

Nathan showed him his phone.

“You haven’t talked to her yet?”

He shook his head. He’d been avoiding his mother’s messages and calls for months, beyond a cursory reply here and there so that she knew he was alive, and that was mainly because his therapist kept telling him that he needed to have an honest conversation with her and he really didn’t want to. He didn’t want to tell her about his depression, or about the ADHD he had after all been diagnosed with in December, or the other weird diagnosis that Dr. Chambers had recently thrown into the ring.

“It’s called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria,” she’d said two weeks before, and Nathan had scoffed, instantly disliking it mainly because the word _sensitive_ was in it. He was, if anything, the very opposite of sensitive. He was like a barbed wire fence that shredded the flesh of anyone who got close to him, really. Dr. Chambers, by now used to Nathan’s deep scepticism, asked him, “Do you want to know what it is?” a little gently, and he shrugged and said he’d listen.

She’d gone on to explain that it was an emotional response common in many people with ADHD, usually triggered by an experience in which the person felt a deep sense of rejection or failure early in life. “And let me guess, that would be because of my father leaving,” Nathan had said, rolling his eyes, but Dr. Chambers went on, undeterred. People with RSD, she said, usually reacted in two ways: they either became people pleasers, desperate for validation and love, or they completely retreated from any potential further rejection or failure, refusing to expose themselves to further pain. And untreated RSD could manifest itself in different ways: internalization, which led to suicidal ideation, or externalization, which resulted in bursts of extreme anger and even violence.

Nathan had grown increasingly quiet and still as Dr. Chambers’ little spiel continued. As she spoke he kept unwillingly making his own connections, the same connection she had probably made herself but wasn’t saying. He wasn’t stupid, he could figure it out for himself. He wasn’t a people please, never had been. Had he avoided rejection? Well, who wouldn’t? Why would anyone want to be rejected? And perhaps he had missed out on some things, perhaps he’d lashed out and pushed people away; perhaps if Barry hadn’t been so fucking persistent, so increasingly immune to Nathan’s barbed retorts and insults, so stupidly patient and understanding, then he probably would have pushed him away, too.

The suicidal ideation thing was obvious, too. As for the latter, he’d never been particularly violent, but he instantly thought of the night he’d been arrested: the overwhelming frustrated anger and pain that his father had inspired him, kindling some kind of smoldering camp fire of resentment that glowed and burned in chest, barely contained. Then Bev’s stupid comment had lit a match and he’d exploded, and it had seemed perfectly reasonable to pick up that stapler and press it right into his doughy hand, because he needed to hurt somebody, and his fucking father was already out the door, as usual. Exhaustion and sick dread had followed as Bev screamed and shouted at him about pressing assault charges. The rest of the night had been an emotionless blur as the cops arrived, he was handcuffed, taken to the station, booked, and put in lock up for almost an entire day until his mother showed up, either sunburned from Spain or flushed with anger, furious at having her holiday cut short, to bail him out. “They wanted to have psychiatrically evaluated,” she screamed in the car on the way home. “Is that what you want? To be put in a mental institution like your grandmother?” (His father’s mum had been put away, he’d never been sure why, and she’d died before he was born.) Then she’d had to pull over on the side of the road to sob into her clenched fists until he’d shaken himself out of his daze and helplessly patted her on the arm, mumbling that he was sorry.

It really wasn’t any wonder that she’d kicked him out a few months later. Supposedly it had been because of Jezza. But deep down, he’d known immediately that it was just him, she was sick of him, she couldn’t stand to be around him, and Jeremy was just an excuse to get rid of him.

“Nathan?” Dr. Chambers was saying. “What are you thinking?”

He blinked. “Sorry, what?”

She was holding out a box of tissues and he stared at it, not sure why she was giving them to him. “Take them,” she said. “You’re crying.”

He hadn’t realized. He took a tissue and pressed it to his face. It came away soaked.

“It’s just the side effects of my medication,” he mumbled, except he hadn’t experienced this side effect in weeks and Dr. Chambers knew it.

She didn’t contradict him though. “Where did you go, just then?” When he didn’t reply, she prodded him a little further. “It looked like you were working through some stuff.”

He let out a gusty sigh. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“All right, you don’t have to talk about it.”

“But you’re probably right.”

The next week, he’d managed to talk to her about it. It had felt terrible, like ripping open an old, infected wound; or like dying, really, though that was an experience he couldn’t really talk about it.

“This is why I can’t tell Mum about all this,” he’d said. He was fucking around with a Rubix cube she had in her office as spoke -- she had all kinds of crap like that, she said it made it easier for some people to talk if they were doing something with their hands, and it was true, it did help.

“Why not? Explain.”

“Because --” he grimaced. He’d managed to get two rows on each side of the cube lined up but how he was going get the last one sorted, he didn’t know. “Because then she’s going to get all weird and guilty about kicking me out that time. Or maybe defensive about it, I don’t know.”

Dr. Chambers contemplated him for a moment. “Are you angry with her about that?”

“What? No, of course not. What else was she going to do?”

“You can be angry about something while still seeing the other person’s side and understanding their actions. And it’s perfectly fine to be angry.”

“I was an asshole. I would have kicked myself out, too.”

“That’s isn’t answering the question.”

“I’m not angry. I’m …” Fuck, fuck, fuck, he didn’t want to bring this all up again. He squeezed his eyes shut and dropped the rubics cub into his lap, slumping on the couch and kicking fruitlessly at the air. “Stop doing this! Why does this keep happening to me, god damn it.” He scrubbed at his damp eyelids with his sweatshirt’s sleeve.

“Tell me what you’re thinking. You’re working through something right now, Nathan, it’s going to hurt, but you need to get it out.”

“She doesn’t want me,” he managed to get out, through gritted teeth, and his voice didn’t even sound like his, it sounded like it belonged to some kind of wounded animal, not like a person at all. “Nobody … nobody wants me. Except Barry.” And why did he? That was still a mystery to him, no matter how many times Simon told him he loved him, held him tight in his arms, fucked him until he forgot his own name -- it still came back to this simple fact. Nobody really wanted him around. He was like a black fucking vortex that just sucked everything good up and ruined it.

“Breathe, Nathan, breathe,” Dr. Chambers was saying, and it was only then that he realized how tight his chest felt, how he was wheezing like a freight train. He felt completely out of control, his entire body was vibrating with some kind of barely suppressed emotion -- anger or agony, he couldn’t tell. “You’re all right.” She began to count, and somehow he got his breathing under control.

“I hate this bullshit,” he said when he could speak again. “I don’t want to think about it anymore, okay?”

“I know you don’t want to, and it’s perfectly natural to want to avoid it. But that won’t make those feelings go away. This is why I think you need to speak to your mother. She needs to hear how you feel, and you need to hear from her that those fears you have are unfounded.”

_But what if they aren’t?_ was what he thought, but he didn’t say it.

“And one day, you should really speak to your father, too.”

He made a sort of barking laugh. “Well, that’s never happening.”

Dr. Chambers gave him a look, which was remarkably similar to the way Barry looked at him when he was being melodramatic and he wanted him to know that he could see right through his bullshit. And then the session was over and off he went.

That had been a few days ago. He didn’t normally tell Barry much about his appointments -- the whole thing was humiliating enough as it was, he didn’t need it spilling over into the best part of his life, the only part that made him truly happy. But he’d been so distracted by the things they’d spoken about that day that Simon had noticed, and it had clearly worried him, and then Nathan worried that he was thinking he was having a relapse and getting all suicidy again so that night, after they’d gone to bed, he’d told him about it.

About halfway through his whispered confession, Barry had pulled him close and held him, and just the comforting sensation of his arms around him, his heartbeat against his chest playing off against his own, had made the whole thing easier, made it seem less impossible and terrifying.

“You know I really do want you,” Barry had said in a hushed voice. “I’m not … lying or making it up or whatever. More than want, I need you, I … I couldn’t live without you, I don’t even want to think about it.”

Nathan smiled and pressed his face against Simon’s neck, and wished they could just stay here like this forever.

“And your mum loves you, too,” Simon went on, “and she’s proud of you, and the person you’ve become. She told me so.”

That made him raise his head. “When?”

“At our wedding. Well, I mean at the pub after we got married.”

He remembered the two of them speaking together. He’d never given much thought to what they’d said to each other. He wondered if Barry could be making it up, but that didn’t seem likely. More like his mother had just been saying the typical parent-like things that you were meant to say to your new son-in-law. She couldn’t actually mean it. What on earth had he done to make anyone proud, except die a handful of silly ways and trick someone into marrying him?

“You don’t believe me,” Simon said in a wondering tone. “Oh, Nathan. Your doctor is right, you really should speak to her.”

He wondered what in his expression had given it away, what his face had looked like in that moment -- something terrible and vulnerable, he imagined, and didn’t like it, at all. So he’d mumbled something about taking it into consideration, and promptly put it out of his mind.

But Barry hadn’t forgotten. And Nathan had the sinking feeling that he would keep on not forgetting, until Nathan actually had done it.

“All right, all right, I’ll do it,” he said, his stomach churning. “I swear. I’m going to do it. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

And Simon smiled, and kissed him, and he decided it would be okay, if it made Simon happy and got him off his back.

  


The next day, after the blizzard was over, after a lot of shoveling had happened and Becca’s girlfriend had gone home and everyone else had taken off to struggle through the two feet of snow that had fallen to get to their respective jobs and classes, after Nathan had determined that his mother would be home from work, accounting for the time difference -- he reluctantly sent her a message, asking if she was free to do a video chat with him.

Somehow, being able to see her face made the thing seem less scary. Or at least, it would make it harder for him to just conveniently forget to bring it up, and then have to either admit to Barry that he hadn’t done it or lie and pretend he had.

His mother agreed readily and a few minutes later, her pixelated face appeared on the screen of his old, beat up laptop. She beamed at him.

“Nathan, it’s so good to see you. How are you? You look well.”

Did he? “I’m fine, Mum.”

“It’s been so long since we’ve talked. Even on Christmas, we only spoke for a few minutes.”

A pang of guilt tore at him. He’d been tight-lipped at Christmas, not sure what to talk about if he was avoiding the whole “I have depression” thing, which wouldn’t have really been a very festive conversation anyway.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know. Anyway, there’s something I --”

Just then, Asbo lept onto the bed and climbed into his lap, then leaned forward to sniff the computer screen.

“What’s that?” his mother asked, laughing.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s -- that’s my cat.”

“Your cat? You never told me you got a cat!”

She was right, he never had told her. That was something he could have said at Christmas, but she was so tied up in the whole story of his recovery that it hadn’t even occured to him that he could say anything.

“Barry got her for me for our anniversary,” he said, picking her up and pulling her away from the computer. “Just sit here and be good,” he said to her. Asbo thumped her tail once, as if to say, _I will try, but I’m not promising anything_.

“You used to love cats,” his mother was saying, her eyes crinkling with reminscience. “Remember that stray cat you used to feed when we still lived in Portlaoise?”

“Yeah,” he replied, because he did. It had been a black cat with a little white spot on its forehead. “And Dad shooed it off one day by throwing a rock at it.”

She shooked her head. “Your father was never an animal person.”

“Or a people person.”

She laughed, and he smiled, and he didn’t want to talk about all of this boring crap, didn’t want to ruin the moment, perhaps he shouldn’t, it was a terrible idea …

But then his mother was asking, “Was there something particular you wanted to speak about?”

He bit his lip, thought of his upcoming appointment, about Barry coming home in a few hours, all hopeful and expectant. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s not going to be a very fun conversation though, Mum, I’m warning you.”

Her face fell, absolutely crumbled, and he could tell what she was thinking. _What’s my idiot son got himself into now?_ “Is everything all right with Simon?” she asked, tentatively.

“It’s not that, we’re fine, we’re fine,” he said quickly, and she looked relieved. He thought of Simon saying that she’d said he was proud of him; she must have been shocked and amazed that he’d stumbled into a relationship with someone so blessedly responsible.

“What is it, then?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, scrambling for how to start. He hadn’t even tried to prepare anything, the thought of it making him too sick to his stomach, but now he was cursing himself, because he had no idea what to say. Naturally, it all came out backwards and wrong. “Well, Barry wanted me to … I mean, not just him … uh … you see, my therapist --”

“Your therapist?” His mother’s eyebrows had risen in surprise. “You’re seeing a therapist?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s … that’s part of what I’m trying to tell you …”

“Why are you seeing a therapist?” She raised one hand. “Not that I don’t think it’s a good thing, in fact, I think it might be a great --”

“I was depressed,” he blurted out. “Am depressed. Well, I’m taking medication now, so it’s a lot better. But that’s why.”

That crumpled look was back, except it was worse. “Depressed?” she said, faintly. “I don’t understand, you’ve never been … was it the move? Did that set it off?”

“I mean, I think it probably made it worse. But … it’s not something new, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“How long?” his mother asked suddenly, her voice firm. “How long, Nathan?”

He shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “I don’t know … um … since I was like … fifteen maybe?”

She didn’t say anything, just blinked at him in disbelief.

“Remember when I didn’t want to go to school?” he prodded.

“No teenager wants to go to school,” she said, numbly. “I didn’t think …”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said. “You didn’t miss anything, Mum, it’s not like I even realized … I didn’t really know what was wrong with me. It’s hard to explain.”

“You haven’t ever … you aren’t …” she seemed to be struggling to say something, “you didn’t want to do anything … drastic, did you?”

It took him a minute to understand what she was getting at. “Do you mean, am I suicidal? Well, I mean … not actively right now … but that’s part of it …”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” his mother whispered. Then she looked stricken. “What happened on the community center roof -- that wasn’t --”

“No, no, no! I didn’t -- it was an accident, Mum, that’s all.” She looked unconvinced. “Ask Barry, he was there.”

“He was?” She looked thunderstruck. “You never told me that.”

“Yeah, I lost my balance and he tried to grab me but he missed.”

“I didn’t realize that was him.”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, Mum, don’t get hung up on that part, you know it wouldn’t stick anyway, right?” He gave a little laugh, but she only stared at him, stone-faced. He knew she understood about his immortality, they just didn’t talk about it much.

He still remembered the day he’d gone back to the house after he’d been rescued from the coffin. He’d stopped by the community center first, but all of his things were gone (he’d find out later that Kelly had gathered it all and brought it to his mum, so she wouldn’t find out about him being homeless). So he’d gone to her house, hoping to get a shower and change, and well, give her the good news. After she’d gotten over the initial shock, and he’d explained everything, and she’d cried, and he’d gotten cleaned up, he’d gone into his room and started repacking his ruck sack. She’d come into his room midway through, her face still tear-stained, and stared at him. “What are you doing?” she’d asked.

“Packing up,” he’d explained, as though it were obvious, “you know, to get out of your hair.”

“You don’t have to go,” she’d said, “I don’t want you to go. You can move back in. It’ll be all right.”

_She doesn’t mean it_ , he’d thought, _she’s just in shock because she thought I was dead, she’ll regret it before long_. “It’s fine, Mum, trust me. I’ll just piss you off again before long.” He’d stuffed the last of his clothes into his back and zipped it up. “I’ll come by and visit in a few weeks. Hey, can I borrow some cash? I’m a little broke.”

And that was that.

Now, looking at her hollow-eyed, haunted face, he wondered if maybe she really would have wanted him to stay that time. But then maybe he’d never have gotten together with Barry, and all the things that had happened after wouldn’t have, so it was all for the best really …

“Anyway,” he said now, clearing his throat. “This isn’t exactly what I’m supposed to be telling you, that’s just sort of the preface to it … Please don’t cry, mum.”

She wiped her eyes with her wrist. “I’m sorry, darling, go on.”

He didn’t think she’d called him darling since he was a little boy, and it made him feel kind of warm inside, and also worse about what he was about to talk about. “The thing my therapist wanted me to speak to you about was … um, well, when I moved out of the house.” Not kicked out, he wasn’t going to say that.

“When you moved out?”

“Yeah -- well, let me backtrack a little, you see, she thinks I have ADHD too -- remember, they thought that at school and Dad wasn’t having any of it -- and there’s this thing that’s a side effect of ADHD called -- called -- um, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria --” his face colored because he still hated saying it out loud, “which she also thinks I have, and it just means that I, like, blow every little rejection out of proportion in my head and it makes me act like a dickhead --”

“Nathan, Nathan,” his mother was saying, and now she really was crying, “I wasn’t rejecting you --”

“I know, Mum, I know,” he said, and in his arms, Asbo gave a little squeak, and he realized he was squeezing her a little bit too tightly. He let her go, expecting her to run away, but she just resettled in his lap, and he started petting her, wondering if she somehow knew that he really needed her at that moment. “I know that like -- how do you put it -- intellectually -- but my stupid brain doesn’t accept it and it makes me …” he let out a deep breath. “It makes me push people away so that I don’t get hurt again. That’s why I never call you, that’s why I didn’t move back, because deep down I think you don’t want me around and it’s easier if I just avoid you altogether.” Finally! He’d said it. He wasn’t sure if he’d said it the right way, but he’d said something, at least.

“Nathan,” his mother said, her voice strained but firm. She’d steadied herself, calmed down, and she seemed more like his mother now, less sad and crushed, which made him feel a lot better. “Nathan, listen to me. I’ve always wanted you, that’s never changed. From the moment I first held you --” she paused, overcome, and then recovered, “-- do you know you laughed on your very first day alive? You were always laughing, you almost never cried. You were like a dream baby. You made me so happy. Even with everything else going wrong, you always cheered me up. Yes, things changed when you got older, we had some very bad times, and there … there have been days where I felt like I didn’t know who you were anymore. But that doesn’t change how much I love you, Nathan. I’m sorry that I made you leave, it was a mistake. I didn’t know what to do to make things right anymore, but that wasn’t the answer, and I regret it, I truly do.” She let out a long breath. “Are you crying?”

At some point while she was speaking, he’d covered his eyes with one hand. His eyes were burning and he felt like he was choking with the effort of keeping everything in. “Maybe,” he admitted thickly.

“I haven’t seen you actually cry in ages,” she said. “I think the last time I thought you were crying, you were just pretending in order to get me to loan you some money.”

He laughed a little at that. “Well, it’s been happening a lot lately,” he said, wiping at his eyes.

“Nathan,” she said. “Tell me the truth. Are you feeling better? With the -- the therapy, and the medication you said you’re on?”

He thought about it. There were days that were incredibly hard, where it took an enormous amount of strength and willpower that he hadn’t even known he possessed just to get out of bed, get dressed, eat food, take his meds. There were days where it seemed like an insurmountable effort to get on a bus and go to his therapy appointment and talk about thoughts he didn’t want anyone to know he had, emotions he wished didn’t belong to him, things that had happened to him that he’d rather pretend hadn’t. But somehow, he did these things anyway. And those days were becoming less common, which was good, for obvious reasons, but that had its downsides too — because when they did happen, it took him unawares, the shock of how it felt slapping him like a cold salty wave to the face, and he’d think: is this really what every day really used to be like? How did I get through it at all?

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s a lot better, Mum, I promise.”

  


When Barry got home later that evening, he found Nathan lying on the bed, the laptop closed beside him, Asbo splayed out next to him. His eyes were closed but he wasn’t sleeping, just thinking.

“How are you?” Simon asked. He moved the laptop and stretched out behind him, giving Asbo a wide berth when he put one arm around him.

“I did it,” he said. “It went fine. I’m just … exhausted now.”

“I’m so proud of you,” Barry murmured, pressing a kiss to the side of his head. After a moment, he said, “Becca invited us to something tonight, but if you’re too tired I’ll tell her we can’t go.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Her girlfriend hosts some kind of comedy thing. Improv, stand up, something like that.”

“Oh,” he said, opening his eyes and sitting up. “We can go.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded, standing up and stretching. The idea of getting out of the house and being around people was very appealing all of a sudden. “Let’s go! What time is it at? What time _is_ it actually? Can we get dinner first? I’m fucking starving.”

And Barry just laughed and got up, while Nathan hopped around on one leg trying to pull his sneakers on. “It starts at eight, it’s six now, and yes, we do have time if we leave right now.”

“I want a curry, where can we get a curry? Even though it’s not as good here as back home.”

“I’m sure we can find something,” Barry said, and then grabbed him suddenly and kissed him, deeply.

“What was that for?” Nathan said, grinning despite himself.

“I just felt like it,” he replied.

“Well, I am pretty irresistable.”

“Yes, you are.”

Nathan kissed him back. “Come on, let’s go, before I starve to death. Then I’d come back and wake you up in the middle night to get me a pizza. And I know you need your sleep, Barry, so that’s best avoided.”

  


**Welcome to the January Wild Rumpus!**

**This month’s theme is: SPAAAAACE. Here are some facts about space: No one can hear you jack off. Venus is the hottest planet (bow wow chicka bow wow). And we’re not making a Uranus joke, it’s too obvious.**

The club where Agnes’ show was held was in Central Square. They met up with the other roommates, who were also still going, and together they occupied most of a row in the back of the little theater. Nathan was honestly surprised how many people were there; before long nearly all the seats were filled. The thing must be pretty popular, though to be honest he wasn’t really sure what they were about to see. The description on the Facebook invitation they had all received wasn’t very helpful, either.

“Sounds like something you would say,” Simon said to him as they peered at his phone together.

“Really?” He pressed his face against Barry’s head and smiled into his hair.

“Yeah. I mean, you are the funny guy around here.”

“Not really, anymore.”

“What are you talking about? You’re still the funniest person I know.”

Nathan shrugged. Even he didn’t know why, but he hadn’t felt very funny in a long time, more like he was just sort of hitting all the usual checkboxes to get through conversations without really thinking about it. But he didn’t really want to get into it.

Becca’s girlfriend, Agnes, and another woman were the hosts, meaning they introduced each of the performers before they went on. Nathan quickly ascertained that this wasn’t like a regular comedy show. Some of the acts were regular stand up. Others were improv groups or sketches. And then there were others that just defied categorization. Somebody played a weird song they’d written about the moon on a guitar made entirely out of old hubcaps. Another guy gave a slideshow presentation of strange items he’d found while clearing out his grandmother’s house after her death. Most of the acts were hilarious, but some were serious. The only thing they had in common was the theme (space, and its various definitions).

After the show they met up for drinks with Agnes.

“How did you get into doing this?” Simon asked her.

“Oh,” she said, “well, I started out taking classes at the improv and comedy school, and made a bunch of friends through that, and we came up with the show together a few years ago.”

“Classes?” Simon asked. “They give classes?”

Nathan gave him a sharp look. He immediately knew where this was going and he wasn’t having any of it.

“Oh yeah,” Agnes said. “They do classes on stand up, improv, comedy writing, you name it. Why, are you interested?”

“No, not me, I was thinking --”

“Barry,” Nathan said warningly.

“Oh!” Becca said, cottoning on at once. “Yes! Nathan, you should take a class, you’re hilarious.”

His face went red. “That’s okay, I’m good.”

“You don’t have to decide now,” Simon urged. “Just think about it.”

“It’s too expensive,” he muttered, “we’re not going to waste money on --”

“Well, not to stir the pot or anything,” Agnes said a little awkwardly, “but they do actually have a free class every month so people can try it out.”

“There you are,” Simon said to him. “And anyway, it wouldn’t be a waste,” he added doggedly.

Nathan just frowned at him.

“Leeeeet’s change the subject,” Emily said, and they did.

  


“Are you mad at me?” Simon asked that night, when they were in bed in the dark.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nathan said, trying to sound light-hearted. And he wasn’t mad, exactly. He just wished Barry would fucking drop it already.

But of course, just like with the calling his Mum thing, he wouldn’t. “Please, just consider it. If you hate it, I’ll let it go.”

“School and me aren’t meant to be, Barry, we’ve gone over this before,” Nathan said. Years ago, when they’d first started dating and Simon had started at university, he’d started a brief and ultimately fruitless campaign to get Nathan to retake his A-levels and go back to school. The whole thing had culminated in a huge argument that almost led to them breaking up. The only reason they hadn’t was because Barry had finally backed off and let Nathan be, let him keeping working at his series of unskilled, often dirty, always boring jobs.

At the time, the thing that had made him the most upset at the situation was the idea that Barry might be embarrassed by him. He knew he wasn’t good enough for Barry, and everyone else probably knew it, too, and he lived in a sort of perpetual state of anxiety that Simon would also figure it out one day and be done with him. If he submitted to Barry’s attempts to improve himself, then the delusion that his husband seemed to suffer from -- that Nathan had some sort of untapped potential that just needed to be pulled out of him -- would be destroyed, because of course Nathan didn’t actually have anything like that. He’d just fuck up and be a general disaster and Barry would be disappointed in him and realize what a huge mistake he’d made. And he was selfish enough to want to avoid that happening, even if it meant disappointing him in little ways like this, rather than the big, collosal way that was probably inevitable.

(Jesus, Dr. Chambers would have a field day with this, he thought to himself. Whether he’d tell her about it at some point was something he left for later.)

But Barry was back on his bullshit again, unfortunately. “This isn’t school,” Simon said. “It’s about something you’re actually interested in, something you’re good at.”

Nathan shrugged. He didn’t want to argue with Simon.

Barry snuggled closer to him in the bed and carefully wrapped his arms around Nathan, as though afraid he’d be pushed away, but of course Nathan would never do that. He always wanted Barry’s physical affection, as much of it as he could possibly get, whenever he could get it. Words like _co-dependent_ circled around in his head, thanks to his recent crashcourse in psychotherapy, and he told them to buzz right the fuck off, because he didn’t give a shit. It just felt nice, okay?

“I won’t bother you about it,” Simon said. “But please … just give it some consideration? For me?”

Nathan closed his eyes. “Okay, okay, I’ll think about it,” he said.

“Thanks,” Simon said, and kissed his neck, and Nathan closed his eyes and smiled, and hoped that would be the end of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The game they are playing at the beginning is [Betrayal at House on the Hill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_at_House_on_the_Hill). "Invisible Traitor" is really one of the potential haunts, as I discovered right before writing this when I was playing with my wife and our friends. And I couldn't resist. (We actually defeated the haunt but naturally Simon would win at being invisible, come on.)
> 
> The comedy club they go to is ImprovBoston and the show was inspired by a real one that my wife's coworker used to co-host called "The Kerfuffle". And while I was doing some research for this I discovered that the show, which ended a few years ago, has been reborn so now we are going to go see it again in May :D
> 
> Also, as a bonus, here is a picture of Asbo that I needled my wife into drawing for me. Please enjoy.


	5. Spring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took a long time and it's really long and I still had to add ANOTHER chapter to the final count. But that should definitely be the last chapter, I swear! We're almost there.

The class turned out to be held on Saturday afternoons. Nathan knew this because Simon texted him the website after it became clear that Nathan wasn’t going to look for it himself. And then when it became clear that he wasn’t going to click on the link and read it, Simon extracted the most salient information -- date, time, location -- and texted that to him, too. They didn’t talk about it, there was no arguing. Nathan ignored the texts and life went on as usual.

He did mention it to Dr. Chambers at his appointment that week.

“Why don’t you want to go?”

He shrugged. “It’s just a waste of time.”

Very kindly, Dr. Chambers did not point out that he didn’t have much else to fill up his schedule; if anything he was made of time to waste. Instead, she said, “Why do you feel it would be a waste?”

He told her all of the reasons. They were things he couldn’t say to Barry because his husband would get all offended on his behalf and argue with him about it. It was a dumb thing to take a class in -- either you were funny or you weren’t, you couldn’t learn how to do it in a class. Nobody in their right mind would ever pay to go see him bullshit on a stage when he did it for free all the time and everyone (except Barry) hated him for it. One class would inevitably lead to another, and then it would cost money, and Simon couldn’t afford that. It wasn’t worth the effort. He wasn’t worth the effort.

Inevitably that was what it came down to, and then there was a lot of back-and-forth about self-esteem issues and valuing yourself and finding your bliss and all of that. He didn’t give a shit. It didn’t turn out to be the most productive therapy session, basically.

Saturday came around. Simon was working very hard on a big final project, a short film that he’d been developing all semester, and now he was beginning to edit it. Nathan was trying to be quiet. Simon didn’t mention the class, but as the time that Nathan would have to leave to get to the class on time approached he kept glancing at the time on his phone and then, occasionally, glancing at Nathan, who was listening to music with his earbuds in and reading Twitter.

It wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t going.

Simon couldn’t make him feel guilty about this.

Anyway, it was pouring out, and freezing, still more winter than spring. There was no way he was going outside.

He turned off his music but left his earbuds in and listened to Simon’s mouse clicks, the slight tinny sound of audio trickling out of his headphones, stopping and starting as he paused and restarted clips. Out of the corner of his eye he saw him check his phone again.

Fuck.

He surged up off the bed, pulling the earbuds out. “Well, I’m off,” he said, louder than he needed to, and Simon looked up, startled, and pushed back his headphones.

“Off?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t say where, just pulled on his winter boots and laced them up, not looking at him. When he stood up, Simon was watching him with a faint, almost hopeful smile on his face. _Fuck_.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Simon said. “Have fun.”

Nathan grabbed his coat and gave him a vague wave and left.

 

Without really meaning to, he wound up at the bus stop. He stood there, smoking, blinking rain drops out of his eyes, wondering where he should go and what he should do. Should he just wander around and then come back after an appropriate length of time? And then what? Lie to Simon?

The bus came. He put out his cigarette and got on.

He’d lied to Simon plenty of times, but it was usually about little things: he was fine; he’d slept okay; yes, he’d eaten lunch; no, he hadn’t gotten fired, they’d just let him go. Well, not all of them were so little. He didn’t really like doing it, it just made life a little easier. Lying about this would make his life a lot of easier, at least for the time being; but then it might make it a lot harder, because he knew it wouldn’t end here, with this class, even if he made up some shit about how he’d tried it, as an experiment, but it wasn’t really his thing. Simon would be disappointed but he wouldn’t let it go. He’d point out different classes, he’d ask him detailed questions about what he hadn’t liked. He was stubborn that way. And eventually Nathan would have to tell him the truth, which was actually what had ended up happening that time long ago that he’d been fired from the job at the post office, and there had been a big argument centered around topics such as trust and honesty and respect that had left him seriously frightened that Simon might end things with him forever.

The bus pulled into Harvard Square. He got off and stood in the square for a few moments, looking at the passing pedestrians hunched under dripping umbrellas. A raindrop insinuated itself beneath the collar of his parka and trickled down his back. He crossed the street and took the stairs down into the train station.

Dr. Chambers would be disappointed, too. Not about him not going to the class, though she’d probably be as pleased as Barry if he did go. She’d be disappointed that he didn’t just talk to Simon and tell him he was definitely not going; that instead he’d pretended like he was going to do it (though he’d never actually said it! Just implied it!) and instead fucked around in the rain for an hour while Barry thought he was having some stupid life changing experience.

Central was only one stop from Harvard. Before he knew it he was climbing out of the subway and back in the rain, standing next to a homeless amputee in a wheelchair outside of Blick Art Materials. He took his wallet out; he only had a five and a ten. He gave him the five.

And then there was nothing for it: he had to decide what he was actually going to do. He could go sit inside Dunkin Donuts with all of the smelly old men and hate himself for awhile. That was certainly an option.

He walked down the street to the comedy school instead, his mood getting darker with every step. He should just turn around and go home and tell Barry to fuck off with this nonsense and never to bring it up again.

Inside, it was dry at least, and warm. A brown-skinned guy in a baseball cap was sitting at the box office, looking at his phone. He looked up when Nathan entered.

“I’m here for the thing,” he said.

“Down the hall and to the right,” he said, pointing.

Nathan hesitated, tempted to just turn around and go right back the way he came, but the guy gave him kind of a funny look, so he unzipped his parka and stalked down the hallway as directed.

 _This is going to be a fucking epic-level disaster,_ he thought. There were about five other people in the room. He leaned against a wall and tried not to make eye-contact. _How long is this, anyway?_ He opened his texts and found the link Barry had sent him, but not before seeing a new message from him that simply said, _love you!_ He flushed and clicked on the link. An hour and a half.

Well, he supposed he’d endured worse. Like seventeen hours trapped in a coffin, six feet under. This might rival that, but it couldn’t possibly be worse.

The class started. They all had to introduce themselves. Predictably, everyone fixated on him because of his accent, but he pretended not to notice.

The first thing they talked about were the rules of improv. They learned about “Yes, and”. That they shouldn’t block other performers with the word “no”. That they should always add more information, and to avoid questions because put the pressure back on someone else. To be specific. That the point was to tell a story where the characters changed, and that resisting a change made the story stagnant.

None of this was news to Nathan, which honestly surprised him. He didn’t know how he knew these things. They just seemed obvious to him. It was kind of strange to hear them spoken out loud.

Then they had to practice doing an improv -- and this was what he’d been dreading. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it until the moment they were about to begin, and then it suddenly became clear to him:

What if he couldn’t do it? What if the words, which always used to come so easily, dried up in his mouth? Or what if all that came out were insults and filth, and everyone stared at him in the way people usually did when he went off on one of those tangents, and he realized that he’d never actually been funny, but just an asshole?

He thought the main reason that he didn’t want to go to this class was because he didn’t care, but suddenly it became very apparent to him that it was in fact the opposite reason. He cared way too much. Because if his fears were true and he wasn’t actually funny, or he had forgotten how to be, then who the fuck was he?

But it was too late to back out now.

The scene started and he followed the thread of the conversation like a fish gasping at a dangling hook, trying to figure out when to bite at it. And then something lit up in his brain and he seized on it, and words erupted from his mouth, that old cocky voice of his, his lips twisting up in a mocking grin, and then it happened again, and again, and people were grinning at him, and he realized that he felt more alive and like himself than he had in … ages.

  


When the class was over he felt shaky, exhausted, a little high, almost like he did after a panic attack, but with less existential despair. The instructor told him he hoped he’d come and take another class some time.

The rain had stopped, and the sidewalk was awash in deep, muddy puddles that he strode through without noticing. The homeless guy was still sitting outside of Blick’s. He took out his wallet and gave him the ten before he climbed down the stairs into the subway.

His mind raced throughout the train ride, and then the bus ride, home. So he’d done it. And it wasn’t so bad. But now what? He certainly wasn’t going to spend Barry’s money on classes like that so he could pad his ego and get high off of making people laugh at him; but now his brain felt like a starving animal that wanted more, and he didn’t know how to feed it.

By the time he got home he felt a little deflated, the high worn off and reality had set in. When Simon gently asked him how it went, he just shrugged, and for a moment Simon looked a bit discouraged. But as the evening wore on Nathan kept getting lost in thought, his mind going over the scene they’d done and the different things he could have said, and how that would have changed things; and when he’d look up Barry’d be watching him, a ghost of a smile on his face, as though he knew just what was going on in his brain, the meddling little fucker.

  


Wednesday was his birthday. Twenty-eight: soon he'd really have to stop pretending he wasn't an adult. Simon had an early class to go to so he wished Nathan a happy birthday while they were still in bed, and made some crack about their two year age gap and what it was like to be married to a sophisticated older gentleman, which made Nathan want to bite him.

A few hours later, his mother called. He was still in bed but awake.

“Check your email,” she said. “Your present is in there.”

He put the phone on speaker and opened his email, which he hadn’t looked at in ages, because he didn’t get much except notifications and junk mail. When he saw what the present was he went very still.

“Did Barry put you up to this?” He clicked on the email. It was a gift card for the comedy school for an unspeakably large amount of money.

“Simon said it was something you wanted to do but you were hesitant to spend the money,” his mother said, “and I think you’d be good at it.”

He bristled at the word “wanted” but that was the problem, wasn’t it, he did kind of want to do it, but he didn’t really want to tell anybody.

“He shouldn’t have done that,” he muttered. “It’s too much money.”

“It’s enough to pay for a full class. And it’s fine. Don’t you like it?”

“I -- argh -- ugh,” he said intelligently.

“Nathan,” she urged, “just say thank you and get over it.”

“Okay,” he sighed. “Thank you.”

“Happy birthday, Nathan. I love you.”

“Love you too, Mum.”

  


He didn’t exactly get over it. When Simon got home, he was lying on the bed, petting Asbo, and one look at his face made his husband stop in his tracks.

“I got you cupcakes. They’re in the kitchen.”

Nathan stared at him.

“Happy birthday?”

He stopped petting the cat and crossed his arms, raising one eyebrow. He thought he was doing a pretty good job channeling his mother when she was pissed off.

“Are you really, honestly mad at me about this?”

“Well, I can’t be mad at Mum, it wasn’t her idea.”

Simon dropped his backpack on the floor and climbed on the bed. “I just want to make you happy.” He reached out to put his hand on Nathan’s leg, but Asbo sat up and hissed at him. Nathan allowed himself a moment of smug pleasure as Barry pulled his hand back, but then shooed Asbo away, because as irritated as he was, he didn’t actually want Barry to get scratched.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Please forgive me.” He laid his head on Nathan’s stomach and looked up at him with pleading eyes.

Nathan sighed and put a hand on his smooth hair, so different from his own. “It’s a lot of money, Barry.”

“You said you didn’t want to spend our money on it.”

“Your money.”

“It’s our money, we’re married. We share our financial situation. We have a joint bank account with both our names on it. But anyway, you said you didn’t want to spend it, and then your mum asked me for ideas for your present, and said she wanted to get you something really important, well, because you know. You’ve had a rough year.”

Nathan bristled at that but didn’t dispute it.

“Just … give it a chance, like you did with the free class, okay? Give …” Barry rubbed his face against his stomach and kissed the bare skin where his shirt had ridden up, sending shivers all along Nathan’s body. “Give yourself a chance.”

Nathan’s hand had turned to petting Barry’s hair. “You know I can be horny but still annoyed with you, right?” He felt Barry’s lips curve into a smile against his skin. Nathan sighed. “You mentioned something about cupcakes?”

  


Later, after the cupcakes (which Nathan initially proclaimed could only be eaten by people over the age of twenty-seven, which meant only him and Alberto; but Al convinced him that they should share) and beer, and after he and Barry had gone out to the movies and then to dinner, and Barry had given him his present (a copy of John Hodgman’s _Vacationland: Stories from Painful Beaches_ , because Nathan liked to listen to the Judge John Hodgman podcast with him); after all of that, when it was dark out and they were in bed, and Barry had two fingers knuckle-deep in him and Nathan was enjoying that fuzzy, out-of-body feeling of expansiveness that sometimes came over him during sex, like the place where their bodies were interacting was the only thing holding him to this earth -- amidst all of that, he was suddenly overwhelmed by how incredibly happy Barry made him sometimes -- okay, a lot of the time -- even when Nathan tried hard to ruin it by being masochistic and ungrateful.

“Thanks,” he panted, abruptly.

Barry, who had just slid his fingers out and was getting into a better position, froze and blinked at him owlishly. “You’re welcome … but for what?”

“My birthday and … everything.” He reached down and guided him inside and they both paused a minute to gasp.

“Ah,” Barry said when he had recovered. He shifted a little and Nathan had to shove his pillow into his mouth so he could yell into it. “Well, my pleasure, I guess.” He grinned, and Nathan rolled his eyes and removed the pillow from his mouth.

“Oh, never mind, just shut up and fuck me, Barry.”

  


The class he chose to take was Intro to Stand Up. He liked improv, but he kind of felt like he already knew to do it (though maybe that was just him being arrogant, which, honestly, he kind of was). Stand up seemed like some sort of unachievable, terrifying fever dream, a weird combination of standing up in front of the class to give a presentation and then turning around and mooning them all -- something Nathan had actually once done, which had led to a three day suspension and his mother threatening to send him to go live with his father for the rest of the term, which had worked wonders for getting him to repent.

Except getting your ass out in public seemed a lot less exposing and vulnerable than getting up on a stage and trying to tell jokes. What if you completely fucking bombed? And unlike in improv, if you failed, it was nobody’s fault but your own.

But for some reason he really, really, really wanted to do it.

He began privately watching bits of comedy that he remembered liking in the past -- Mitch Hedburg and Bo Burnham and Frankie Boyle and the Mighty Boosh. But when he watched it now he felt like he was watching it in a different way. He kept pausing the video and putting down his phone and trying to figure out why the jokes worked (and sometimes why they didn’t). Often he couldn’t quite put words to it or break it down, and he desperately wanted to know if there was was a way to do that.

Also, he started reading. He read _Vacationland_ first. Simon had made a joke when he’d given it to him that it might keep out of the trouble if they went to the beach this summer, but instead he read it right away, in two days. He used to read a lot, when he was a kid: Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Spike Milligan, all of that stuff. He’d stopped at some point, for a bunch of reasons -- some of it probably the ADHD, in retrospect, but also most of those books had come from his father, who shared, or perhaps shaped, his tastes and interests, and after he started hating the guy it was hard to enjoy the same things. But now he kind of wanted to read them again. Barry had the entire _Hitchhiker’s Guide_ series in a big omnibus, so he borrowed it. Simon, who’d never seen this side of him, was clearly a little dumbstruck by it. Nathan could feel his eyes watching him one day while he laid on the couch, engrossed in _Life, the Universe, and Everything_. When he looked up and met his eyes Barry only smiled. Nathan put the book down.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Simon was crouched in front of the window setting up a camera on a tripod. The camera was pointed out the window where a large maple tree’s branches hovered, the buds still reddish brown and dead to the world.

“Timelapse,” he replied.

“Cool.” He watched him for awhile, the book open and resting against his mouth, while his eyes took in the sight in front of him. He liked the slight crease between Barry’s brows as he concentrated on getting the position of the camera right, selecting the correct settings, testing it out. His mouth, in contrast to his brow, was relaxed and soft. His strong shoulders were hunched, the back taut and curved as he worked. Beautiful.

Nathan breathed in deeply. The book smelled like decaying paper and a bit like Barry, which made sense because it was Barry’s book. Simon looked back up at him and smiled again, and Nathan smiled back and went back to reading.

  


By the time the first class met, his mind was buzzing with ideas and questions. It was sort of like some part of himself had been sleeping for ten or so years and now it was awake and it was insatiable. He actually … wanted to learn.

And he did learn. He learned about incongruous juxtaposition and the rule of three, he learned about paraprosdokian and shaggy dog stories and the method of loci, and about tags and toppers and a tight five and “A material”. All these different ingredients that when combined in the right way made the stew of a good and funny story. All of these things that he’d kind of understood, intrinsically, just by being exposed to them, but never had names for them, never realized they had names. Never knew that other people noticed them that way, too. Never been around so many people who invoked them quite the way he did. And who wanted to talk to him about them. And who understood his jokes so well. And who wanted to hang around him and not just because they had community service or work together for seven hours a day, or because they lived in the same flat.

It was fucking weird.

  


Nathan began working on an act almost without realizing it. He’d find himself telling a story in his head while he was on the bus, lines wriggling into existence out of the morass of his meandering thoughts, and eventually he started getting better at writing them down, opening up the notepad feature on his phone to jot it down so he wouldn’t forget.

He knew what he wanted the routine to be about. He could see it in his mind, sharp and defined in some places, vague and full of question marks in others. He let it sit and grow for awhile without doing anything about it, trying to figure out how it would work, before he started to trying to actually put it down into words. For some reason, he was reluctant to do it, like the fantasy of it might burst if he made it too real. But it was growing too cumbersome and unwieldy to just keep in his head, so he dragged out his old laptop one day and began transcribing all of the little notes he’d taken and tried to put them in some semblance of order.

He had almost finished when a wave of deja vu overtook him so strongly that it made him slightly nauseous. Nathan froze, fingers still brushing the surface of the keyboard, and remembered another keyboard, the buttons yellowed and slightly sticky and the letters on it faded from use; the glowing screen of an old blocky computer monitor hovering in front of him. Everything smelled like tea and cigarette smoke, and an overstuffed ashtray sat just inches away from the keyboard where his small fingers slowly typed out one letter at a time.

“What’s it about?” his father was asking, sitting next to him on a couple of old Banker’s boxes, crushed slightly under his weight. The reason he was sitting on them was because seven-year old Nathan was in his desk chair, legs tucked up under him.

Nathan didn’t remember what it was about, didn’t remember what he told him. He just remembered his father listening with uncharacteristic patience and then printing out two badly typed pages and pinning them to the corkboard on the wall above his desk. And then he told him to run along now, Dad had to work, writing his boring pitch reports for the local paper or maybe secretly working on that novel that he would never actually publish (to Nathan’s knowledge, anyway).

When he came back to himself he was clenching his fists so tightly that they hurt. He opened them slowly and closed the laptop and then just sat there and breathed through it. He didn’t feel panicky, just unbelievably furious and disgusted, and he couldn’t really pinpoint why. He felt like he had that time he’d stapled poor Bev’s hand at the bowling alley. Like he wanted to hurt somebody.

When he could think straight again, he texted his therapist, and then he reopened the laptop. But instead of going back to the word document he’d started, he opened up a browser window and typed in his father’s name, first _Mike Young_ , then when he realized that wasn’t the name his bylines were under, _Michael F. Young_. The results yielded years’ worth of newspaper columns. The older ones were all sport journalism, just like he remembered, but the newer ones were different. He had a regular column in one of the London papers that didn’t seem to have any set theme, but a lot of it was autobiographical in nature. He clicked on one at random, and then another, and he was still reading them when Dr. Chambers called him.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

He explained, as best he could, what had happened. “I’m reading his articles right now.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it making you upset?”

He thought about it. “Yes and no. I … I don’t feel like I did before but …”

“But?”

“There’s stuff in these articles I never knew about.” He hit the back button a few times until he got to the one that had shocked him the most. “All of this stuff about him being a children’s home when he was a kid. Like, I knew my grandparents were dead but he never told me any of this.”

“Why is that upsetting to you?”

“Because it’s shitty to learn things about your father from a newspaper column he wrote instead of him telling it to you in the almost thirty years you’ve been alive, I guess.”

“Maybe you could tell him that.”

Nathan snorted, but didn’t say anything.

They talked for a little longer, and when it was over he felt a little bit better, but it was still bothering him. He googled the name of the children’s home his father had mentioned in the article and found a bunch of stories about people suing the organization that ran it for child abuse dating back to the 1970s, and then he really had to stop because he was getting angry again and he didn’t even know who he was angry at.

He told Barry all about it later, when they met up for dinner. Simon had an interview for an internship at a company in the Seaport District and so Nathan took the Silver line to meet him afterwards, and they got KO Pies and ate them as they sat in the big, circular white swings they had set up at the Lawn on D.

“Your therapist is right, you should talk to him about it.”

“He didn’t even mention anything about getting abused or whatever in his article.”

“But it’s still upsetting you.”

Nathan waved his half-eaten meat pie at him. “Whatever. I don’t give a shit about that bastard’s hypothetical trauma anyway. Tell me about your interview.”

Simon made that face he always did when Nathan was trying to change the subject away from icky feelings, but took mercy on him and told him about the internship, which had something to do with making promotional videos for an app startup or something. Nathan didn’t really understand it but he was sure Simon could do it, because he was brilliant.

By the time they left it was getting dark and the LED lights on the swings were starting to illuminate, covering the open lawn with weird ghostlike white loops that swung and dangled in the air.

“I’m glad you’re writing,” Barry, seeking out his hand as they walked to the T stop. “I didn’t know you liked it.”

“I don’t.”

“It sounds like you used to like it, anyway.”

Nathan shrugged.

“I think you’d be a good writer. I mean, half the things you say just off the top of your head sound like something somebody spent a long time trying to write.”

“Well,” Nathan said noncommittally, “I am kind of brilliant, after all.”

Simon rolled his eyes and squeezed his hand.

  


The next day, he started writing an email to his father.

It took about a week, all told. He kept deleting and going back and rewriting part of it. He’d work on his routine a little bit, trying to nudge things into some sort of coherent narrative order, and then he’d get frustrated and open up the email again and write some of that, and then get even more frustrated and go back to the routine, until Barry got home from classes and distracted him with food or tv or sex or whatever.

The problem with the routine was that he knew what he wanted to say but couldn’t figure out how to say it. The problem with the email was that he didn’t know what he wanted to say but had plenty of ideas about how to say it -- preferably with a lot of profanity mixed in. But nothing of that sort that he wrote made him feel any better, it still felt like he hadn’t gotten to the heart of it, relieved the pressure that kept bubbling up in his chest whenever he thought about his Dad, the good stuff, the bad stuff, the stuff that they’d never spoken out loud.

The anniversary of Jamie’s death was coming up.

They’d made a go of it, being father and son, for awhile after he’d died. That was what Jamie had wanted. But then Nathan got distracted with Barry, and his dad … well, he’d just been him. Mike Young. Colossal disappointment of a father figure. It was easy to put off seeing each other, easy to let months slip by with no contact, easy to let the old hurts overwhelm him and make him bitter about it, because even during that brief period where they’d tried to make happy families again they’d never been able to bring up the real issues. His father would never apologize and Nathan wouldn’t ask for an apology, not outright, anyway. What was the point?

He thought about the card his father’d sent, after the wedding, with the check. His mum must have called him up and told him, _your son’s getting married_ . He hadn’t come, but he hadn’t been invited, either. But he’d sent that card. Nathan hadn’t called him to say thank you, though when he’d told his mother about getting it in the mail she’d said, _I’ll tell him you received it next time I talk to him_ . How often did they talk, anyway? Was Jezza okay with that? He imagined his father as a sort of hopeless untethered balloon that his mother occasionally tugged down to earth to remind him that he had a son, convey news back and forth between the two warring parties like some sort of sad go-between. Had she told him about their conversation? _Mike, your son’s depressed and suicidal, thought you’d like to know_.

He read over what he’d written in the email and deleted it all and started again.

This time he put a link to the news article, the one that talked about the children’s home, and wrote beneath it, _Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?_ And then before he could think about it too hard, he hit _send_.

He instantly felt like throwing up. This was a terrible idea.

Days and days passed by without a reply and he just got grumpier and more upset about it. He didn’t want to tell Simon about it, but of course he could tell something what bothering him. “I’m fine,” he told him. “I’m just in a bad mood. It’s nothing.”

“You should talk to your therapist,” Simon said, his voice anxious.

“I will, I will. Don’t worry your pretty head about it.”

Simon gave him a look.

He tried to get a hold on himself. Maybe Dad wouldn’t ever reply to the email, and that was fine. He could live with it. Maybe he’d be better off if he did. Maybe the email had wound up in his spam folder, or he never checked his inbox anyway and it had been buried under spam messages about erectile dysfunction. That seemed very likely.

  


Simon’s big project was being screened, along with the rest of his cohort’s, at a private event at the Coolidge Corner Theater. He sat with the other roommates in seats that Simon had reserved for them in the sixth row, while Barry sat with his classmates in the front row. Every time Nathan looked at the back of his head, he was overcome with a wave of affection and pride and awe. Barry’d really done it. He’d wanted to do this all his life and now they were all about to watch something he’d made on a big screen.

Before they dimmed the lights, he took out his phone and messed around on it a little, half listening to Emily reading out loud the titles of the other people’s films, and then he clicked on his email, not really expecting to find anything.

But there was something there. His dad had replied.

He froze for a minute, thumb hovering over it, the little preview showing the first few words of what his father had written. _I’m sorry this took so long for me to write …_

The lights went dark.

“Nathan,” Becca whispered, poking him in his side, and he put the phone away.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

He wanted to know what was in that email, but he didn’t want to know, either. And he wanted to pay attention to Barry’s film. Why did he have to send it now, the bastard? He always had the worst sense of timing.

For the first few films, it was all he could think about, what his father might have written in that email, what excuses he made, whether he said anything at all, whether he’d find it frustrating or enraging or disappointing. But then Barry’s film started, and he saw that familiar, beloved head twist around, very quickly, and he knew Simon was looking for him. He forgot about the email. He watched.

He didn’t know what Barry’s little movie was about. He tried not to get too nosey about it, Barry was sensitive about little things, easily embarrassed, worked better alone and in solitude. So he wasn’t sure what to expect. The only thing he had to go on was the title, which according to the program was _Lightning_.

And that’s what it started out with: lightning. Shot after shot of it, hitting roofs, disappearing behind the Boston skyline, arcing through the sky like cracks in an eggshell. Gray heavy skies loomed oppressively, a thick, woolly blanket spread over the earth. Rain trickled down gray cement walls and pooled into streams that rivuleted into the soggy earth. Each scene passed rapidly by, so that the whole thing felt like something stitched together out of many complex tiny parts.

And then it slowed, and the next scene was instantly familiar. It was the tree outside their living room window. The timelapse video. On the screen, the branches swayed jerkily in the wind, the sun rose and disappeared, the sky darkened, remaining pockets of snow melted, and the buds on the tree grew green and gradually unfurled gently into fuzzy little leaves, spreading and stretching until they blanketed the screen completely. Beside him, Becca let out a little noise of delight.

When the film ended and the audience clapped, Nathan realized his eyes were slightly damp, but when Barry twisted around to look at him again, he grinned and clapped as hard as he could.

  


Afterwards on the train ride home, they huddled next to each other, the roommates deep in a conversation about their plans for Marathon Monday, which was the following week. Nathan leaned his head against Simon’s head. “It was about the storm, right?” he asked suddenly, without context, knowing Barry would understand.

Simon nodded.

They sat in silence for awhile, and then Barry said, “That’s what it did for me, you know. Made the dead world come to life again.”

Nathan gave him a squeeze. “Me too, Barry.”

  


It wasn’t until Barry was asleep and he was nearly there, too, that he suddenly remembered, vividly, that his father had replied to his email.

He sat up in bed like a shot, then glanced over at Simon’s sleeping form. Carefully, he lowered himself back onto the bed, on his side, and picked up his phone, then cursed and lowered the brightness as much as he could. Then, hovering over it to try to shield the light it cast as much as possible, he opened the email.

It took a moment for his sleepy eyes to make sense of the words on the screen. The apology he’d seen in the preview came into focus, followed by a thick, heavy paragraph like a solid wall. He scrolled down quickly and saw that the email was fucking gigantic, practically a novel, and he wondered if the reason his father never got an actual novel published was because he spent so much time writing stupidly long emails.

Then he settled down to read it.

It was confusing and meandering and there were excuses scattered throughout that irritated him. But he kept reading, something hooking him in despite his frustration, and maybe it was because he didn’t think his father had ever spoken (written?) so much to him all at once, at least not since he was really little. He’d never been so honest either (at least, Nathan thought he was being honest).

His mind stuttered over phrases like _never wanted you to know_ and _didn’t think you’d ever see it anyway_ and then stopped on _didn’t know how to be a good father to you_ and stayed there for awhile, reading it over and over again. It was an acknowledgement, at least.

He didn’t realize he was sniffling until he felt Barry’s arms slide around him, his sleepy voice murmuring, “What’s wrong?”

Wordlessly, he handed the phone over to Barry, who read it with an expression that slowly graduated from confusion to realization to something passive, thoughtful. By that time Nathan had stopped whatever it was he was doing -- not crying, exactly, just embarrassingly leaking.

He wasn’t sure what Barry was going to say, but he certainly hadn’t considered it would be what he did say, which was, “You should talk to him about your writing.”

“What?” Nathan blinked a few times.

“I think it would help you.”

Nathan thought about this for a few minutes. “I think he’s the reason I never wanted to do it.”

“I know,” Simon said.

“Of course you did,” Nathan huffed.

Simon just handed him back the phone and stroked his arm wordlessly. Nathan scrolled through the email again, rereading bits of it, and concluded that his father was just A Person. An often really shitty person, sure, but nothing more than that.

“Maybe,” he said, and put the phone away, and then curled into Simon’s side and tried to go to sleep.

  


He did write to him about it, after a few more awkward, stilted emails back and forth. He was surprised by the response he got back. It was more confident and prepossessed than the previous messages they had exchanged had been, the ones about icky things like feelings and the past. His Dad, he realized, was excited by the idea of his son writing. Maybe even proud.

 _Sometimes it helps to look at things from far away_ , his father said, _the big picture, you know. It’s hard to see it when it’s trapped in a computer screen._

He mulled it over and then figured _What the hell?_ He printed out the messy word document he’d been laboring over on Barry’s printer, then borrowed a pair of scissors from Becca and proceeded to cut out each of the barely cohesive thoughts etched on there so that soon their bed was covered in little white strips, like a sad colorless confetti.

Things were starting to come together by the time Simon came home. His father had been right. Seeing things from far away did make you look at them differently. He’d twitched sentences back and forth and left gaps where he knew there needed to be something that he hadn’t quite grasped, only to find his brain suddenly spurting out what that something ought to be, so that he had to grab some of Simon’s post-it notes to fill them in.

“Wow,” Barry said, a little breathlessly, at the sight of Nathan, sitting on his heels on the floor and crouched over the bed, writing rapidly on a post-it note with his cramped, left-handed scrawl, the bed a patchwork quilt of paper.

Nathan felt a momentary flash of embarrassment, but Barry was looking at him with fondness, an emotion that he recognized as mirroring the one he’d felt at the movie theater as Simon’s film played out before him. He pushed the embarrassment away, stood and stretched, ripped off the post it and slotted it into place. “Now what am I supposed to do with this?” he muttered.

Simon wound up finding him some tape, and he spent a confusing hour sticking everything to many sheets of printer paper. Meanwhile Simon made them dinner and then they ate it sitting on the bed, an episode of _Chewing Gum_ playing on Simon’s computer, while Nathan flipped through the pages, excitement like little jolts of lightning shooting through his fingers.

  


A few days later he sent Agnes, Becca’s girlfriend, a text, asking if he could get a spot in the May Wild Rumpus. She texted him back that he was in.

The theme was “Crime and Punishment”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Central Square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Square,_Cambridge): a neighborhood in Cambridge.
> 
> [Seaport District](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaport_District): a neighborhood in Southie that has become a technology hub.
> 
> [KO Pies](https://www.yelp.com/biz/ko-catering-and-pies-south-boston): a restaurant that serves Australian meat pies. While writing this I discovered the South Boston location closed :(((
> 
> [The Lawn on D](https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60745-d8525619-Reviews-The_Lawn_On_D-Boston_Massachusetts.html): an outdoor space in the Seaport that does, indeed, have giant glow in the dark swings.
> 
> [Coolidge Corner Theater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolidge_Corner_Theatre): an arthouse cinema in Brookline (a suburb of Boston). Fun fact, John Hodgman used to work there.
> 
>  
> 
> [Follow me on tumblr!](http://temporal-infidelity.tumblr.com)


	6. The Destination

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh hey it's *checks calendar* 7 months later and surprise! I'm finishing this story! I got a very nice comment from someone the other day about this fic and honestly, I think about it a lot. I knew everything that was going to happen in this final chapter but I just never sat down to write it. I was really busy with real life stuff this summer (like buying a house and moving to the suburbs, yikes) and then I was spending a lot of time this fall working on my original novel. But yesterday I had a slow day and I wasn't able to write anything for that project so I just sat down and wrote this entire final chapter out. Here it is.
> 
> This fic was very important to me. To make a long story short, when I started it was I very depressed but only vaguely aware of it, and it wasn't until I wrote all about Nathan's depression that I read it back and realized some of it described me and therefore perhaps I was depressed, too. And so writing this actually pushed me to start going to therapy too. 
> 
> Thanks everyone for all of your comments, and sorry it took so long.

The entire week before the Wild Rumpus was probably the most nerve wracking experience of Nathan’s life. Maybe rivaled a bit by the week before the wedding or when they were moving, but there’d been lots of distractions and Barry was taking care of most of it, so he’d been able not to think about it a lot. Right now he couldn’t think about anything but his act. Everything was resting on him. 

He kept fiddling with it, messing around with it, practicing it when the apartment was empty, timing it to try to get it under the allotted time, memorizing half of it and then forgetting the rest. He’d always had no trouble memorizing things, that was half of how he’d gotten through school, but his was so piss-scared about doing this that his brain seemed to be failing him. He wound up having to use one of the techniques he’d learned in his class to get it down: the Method of Loci, where you tied each part of your routine to a place, person, or object, and then memorized the order that instead. Somehow, it worked.

The day of the act he found he couldn’t eat anything. Barry kept trying to feed him and every time he looked at food he thought he might puke, but finally he managed to choke down some saltines. He’d never felt like this before; it was as if his body was revolting against him. Jesus Christ, according to Curtis he’d once blown his own brains out on live television in that weird, alternate reality he didn’t remember; if he was capable of that, surely he could get onstage and do the comedy equivalent.

About an hour before it was time to go, Barry brought him his jacket and shoes. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, “before we catch the bus.” Nathan didn’t argue. Maybe a walk would shake out some of the wild excess nervous energy he could feel thrumming through his veins. They walked aimlessly around the neighborhood for awhile, Nathan smoking and deep in thought. 

Finally it was time to go catch the bus. The roommates had all bought tickets and were meeting them at the club. All along the way to Central Square, Nathan sat deadly silent, staring off into the middle distance because he was running over his act again and again in his head. Barry stayed respectfully quiet, just holding his hand and gently rubbing his thumb over the back of his hand, like he was the only thing tethering Nathan to this plane of existence.

The walk from the bus stop to the club was a blur of dark skies, bright street lights, loud pedestrians, and Simon’s hand guiding him along and keeping him from stepping out into traffic because he wasn’t really present in his body most of the time.

And then they were there. Barry was opening the club door. It was loud and crowded with people in the atrium. Nathan felt himself being pulled along towards a large group of people standing in the corner. He saw Becca and Emily and Al. And then …

“There ‘e is!” Kelly’s accent, which couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s, brought him back to himself. Suddenly he was very present, standing in a crush of people, and Kelly Fucking Bailey was there, in the flesh, hugging him, and behind her was Alisha and Curtis and Nikki. 

“Am I having a stroke?” Nathan wondered out loud. “How the hell are you cunts all here?”

Kelly and Alisha laughed, and Curtis and Nikki rolled their eyes. Kelly finally released him and he looked over to Simon, who was smiling broadly at him.

“You did this, you sneaky bastard,” Nathan accused him, and suddenly he was very, very worried that he was going to start crying. He could feel it swelling up in his throat and behind his eyes, and he fought it down with everything he had. The old London crew didn’t know this new properly medicated version of him that had regular emotions, except maybe Kelly a little, and he was already going to be exposing himself to them enough tonight and wasn’t ready for the rest of it.

Fuck. 

That was right.

They were all here to see his act.

He was going to do his routine … in front of them.

He looked at Barry in a sudden panic, but his husband just smiled gently at him and put an arm around him. “It’s going to be fine,” he said, and Nathan felt himself relax, slowly, like Simon had said some kind of magical spell. Right. He could do this. These assholes knew him better than almost everyone, had carted his dead body around with all his guts spilling out and watched himself be stitched back together and come to life. Of course, he was unconscious for all of that and didn’t have to witness their reactions to it, but he would get through it. And they had come all this way. To see him. He had no fucking idea why, but they had. 

  
  


They caught up for a bit, drank some beers (Barry discretely taking Nathan’s first one away after a bit, which was a good thing, because between his meds and the lack of food in his stomach he was going to get silly quickly if he drank much). Then it was time for them to all go take their seats and for him to head backstage. He told them all he’d see them after the show, kissed Barry, hugged Kelly (and successfully dodged a kiss on the cheek from her, which definitely would have left a big pink lipstick mark). And then he was on his own.

He sat in the back, listening to Agnes and the other emcee introduce each act. He found that, after not being able to think anything about the routine all day, now he didn’t want to think about it at all. He had prepared as much as he could, and he had to trust himself to know it. Instead he paid attention to each of the performers before him, laughing with the audience, making mental notes about some of things they did that he admired. His nervousness was slowly replaced by a weird peacefulness, a confidence that was nothing like the brash arrogance that usually fueled him.

And then it was time.

He heard Agnes introducing him and felt his mouth stretching into a grin. He was here. He was doing this. He was ready.

  
  


“If I had to give this thing I’m doing tonight a title, this is what it would be: ‘How getting arrested changed my life’,” he said into the mic. The audience was a dark blur; he didn’t know where his group was. He might as well be alone, except he could hear them, their disembodied laughter. He pressed on. “It’s sort of like when you’d have an ex-con come and speak at your school assembly and warn you off drugs or whatever, except I’m not warning you off anything, and there’s going to be a  _ lot _ more sodomy involved in this.”

More laughter. His heart was thumping in his chest, but not with nervousness so much as excitement.

“By the way, yes, I am Irish, and also: it’s pronounced KELTIC, okay, you dumbfucks? Not SELTIC.” He’d been torn about whether or not to include this, but it seemed to work, set them at ease. Now he was ready. “But this story is mostly set in London, that’s where I was living at the time.” He took a deep breath. Go.

“Whenever people ask me what I got arrested for, I usually tell them that I was done for eating some pick n’ mix. Do you know what that is? It’s candy, it’s the loose candy they sell in bins.” He spread his hands out. “The scene of the crime: the local bowling alley. The star: me! I looked pretty much the same way I do now -- in other words, like a twink, but  _ aggressively _ heterosexual.” More laughter. “ _ So _ heterosexual that later, when I was doing my community service -- spoilers, I guess -- I used to badger this weird kid in my group and call him a pervert, a pedophile, claim he was sexually attracted to fruit, complain he was staring at my ass all the time. I was  _ so _ heterosexual that  _ now _ , seven years later, that weird kid ... is my husband.” They were laughing, again. It was going well. “I know, I don’t know how it happened either.” His eyes were adjusting to the darkness again. He wished he could find Barry’s face in the darkness, he hoped he didn’t mind him talking about him. He felt like he wouldn’t. 

“Anyway, so here I am, at this bowling alley, with a couple of my mates, who coincidentally sort of hated me, and that was the last time I ever hung out with them. Shocking, because I am so loveable. An hour or so in, I started getting a little peckish so, you know, I helped myself to a little snack. The manager didn’t really like it, if you can believe it. He was this short fat fellow named Beverly. Naturally I had a fucking field day with that. The confrontation really kicked off when I started screaming to the entire bowling alley that I was being assaulted by a chick with a dick, and he loved that, let me tell you.” The laughter turned a little nervous. Good. They should be. “By the way, did I tell you how fucking straight I was? Very, very straight. Not in denial at all.” This time, the laughter was a little relieved. Keep going. “To try to get out of the whole thing, I pretended to have a seizure -- so if you’re keeping track, we’ve racked up both transphobia and ableism, I hope you’re getting a good picture of what a piece of shit I am -- and then while they were distracted thinking I might be dying, I made my great escape! I was like a fucking Celtic -- see, that’s how you pronounce it -- Spiderman, leaping here and there, avoiding capture. At one point I tried to squeeze through the lanes, you know, where the pins are, like they do in the movies, only it didn’t actually end up working, probably because I have the muscle mass of a weedy ten year old.”

He took a break to drink some water and catch his breath, letting the audience breath a bit, before he continued. “Eventually I wound up in Bev’s office, just the two of us. All he wanted was for me to pay for the fucking sweets I took, but naturally I had to be an asshole about it and fuck around with him, mainly because I didn’t really have any money. My mother was on holiday in Spain, so when I called her to get help, she decided to ring up my dad. And let me tell you about my father. He fucked off when I was about ten, after years of being a piece of shit, and every time he’d see me after that our conversations were pretty much limited to him telling me what a fucking waste of sperm I’d been on his part. Is it surprising to any of you that I didn’t have a consistent father figure in my life? What a shocker!”

“So Dad turned up, probably for the first time, to pay for my little indiscretion, and guess what? I decided it was time to completely self-destruct! I did not want any of his help, not one bit of it. So we played a little bit of chicken, like mature adults do, me telling him I didn’t want of his money, him telling me that if the manager called the police, he wasn’t going to help me. And I was like, sure, fine, call the police. What does it matter to me? I’m twenty years old and there’s absolutely nothing else going on in my life, why don’t I just go to jail over some fucking sweets, spice things up a bit.”

He looked up and then he saw them: Barry and Kelly and Becca and all the rest. Barry was smiling, watching him intently,  _ believing  _ in him. A few of the others were a little, too, but most of them were just staring at him. Besides Simon, most of them didn’t know the full story of what had happened when he’d been arrested; the Londoners only knew the basics (“I was done for eaten some pick ‘n mix!”) and the roommates knew nothing. He knew this was ugly. Embarrassing. He let it wash over him, then pushed on.

“So let’s fast forward a bit,” he said. “You already know I did get arrested and I got sentenced to community service -- and given this thing called an ASBO, that’s an anti-social behavior order. They don’t do them anymore but it really fit me, you know? I could have been the ASBO poster child. So I did community service. I met Barry. I was a fucking asshole to him. I tortured the poor kid. He should have hated me. But I don’t know, Barry’s either the nicest person alive or he has a particular fetish for Irish assholes who harrass him constantly.” He watched Simon’s face the entire time he said this, cataloging his reactions to his words, adoring the way he rolled his eyes a little at the phrase “nicest person alive” -- okay, they disagreed about that, whatever -- and bit his lip at “fetish”. Fuck, he loved him. “By the way, did I mention that his name’s not actually Barry? I’m not trying to hide his real name for his protection or anything. His name is Simon. I just started calling him Barry when I first met him because I couldn’t remember his name and when I saw how much he hated it, I never stopped.” Nathan pointed at himself. “Now tell me, if you encountered this would you think,  _ Hm, guess I’ll marry this one! _ No? Wow, shocking.”

He closed his eyes for a minute, regrouping. He was at the midway point. He had no idea how long he’d been up here. Time had no meaning for him anymore. Hopefully he was on track, but he kind of didn’t care. He was completely inside of the story now. He had them in it, too, he could tell.

“We finished community service,” he said, neatly eliding over the storm, their powers, murder, mayhem, etc. “We reintegrated into society. Somewhere in there Barry started letting me kiss him which was kind of insane on his part.” They were still laughing. “Barry went to school, because he’s smart like that, and I got a good dead end job. We moved in together. And then Barry decided he wanted to come here to go to graduate school and I thought, ‘Hey, it was nice while it lasted, I guess. Suppose it’s back to being homeless again.’ Oh shit!” He slapped his face in fake shock. “Did I forget to tell you that I was homeless during community service because my Mum kicked me out of the house? Oops.” He looked up at the roommates. They were laughing, too, but Becca looked a little teary-eyed. He was a little surprised. They knew what a mess he was, had seen him -- maybe not at his worst, but his worst in awhile. 

“But that didn’t happen,” he said. “Because Barry had a crazy plan. A plan that involved proposing to me?” He turned the end of the sentence into a confused question, feigning disbelief, except it wasn’t really fake, because there were still a lot of days where he didn’t understand why Simon spent a single second on him. “So that’s how we got married.” There was some applause and hooting. “Thank you, thank you. And now we’re here.” He watched them all, letting silence fill the room. Time to switch gears.

“I don’t know if you guys know how the whole visa process works, but the long and the short of it is, if you come over here as someone’s spouse, you basically … can’t do anything. Unless you’re a genius scientist or a sexy model or something and people are throwing opportunities at you. Or even if you’re just a normal person who didn’t almost flunk out of secondary school because of an ‘attitude problem’ and couldn’t get into university to save his life.” He gestured to himself. “So when we got here I kind of found myself at loose ends. I didn’t know many people besides Barry and our roommates, who had their own lives, I didn’t really have any hobbies except smoking and getting drunk and getting into trouble, and I didn’t even have a boring job to distract myself with. No ambition. No plans. And …” he licked his lips. He felt a bit like he was about to jump off a cliff. Luckily, he knew he could survive that if he did. “... I started to go a bit … funny after awhile.” He laughed a little, trying to let them know they could laugh, too, but they were quiet. Intent. Listening. 

“The hilarious thing is, I didn’t even realize what was happening to me at the time. The thing about …” he trailed off for a minute, then made himself say it, “the thing about depression is it’s not really dramatic, like you might think it is, it just sort of comes on you really slowly, and you keep thinking ‘Yes, this is normal,’ but your barometer for what normal is gets more and more out of wack, and suddenly you’re idly thinking about how great it would be, for you and everyone else, if you just didn’t exist anymore.” He realized he was rocking from foot to foot a little bit and made himself stop. The room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Becca was wiping her eyes. Nikki and Curtis were leaning against each other, troubled expressions on their faces. He didn’t know how much they knew about this, what Kelly had told him. Kelly had a deep crease between her eyebrows, like she was thinking of bad memories, and Alisha was holding the sleeve of her shirt tightly, without touching skin, but rubbing her arm through the fabric soothingly. Ah. So that’s how it was. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t told him. Good for them.

Barry was still watching him, his eyes gentle and knowing. He couldn’t wait to kiss him after this was over.

“When I finally realized what was happening to me … it was,” his mouth felt dry, but he couldn’t pause to take a drink right now. “It was scary. I thought I was … stronger than that. Immune. Immortal.” He grinned a little, just for himself. “I didn’t want anyone to know, but I couldn’t hide it, either. So,” he took a deep breath, “I got help. And I learned a lot of stuff about myself. Like … apparently I have ADHD and that’s why school was always so hard for me. And I was a lot more torn up about my dad than I thought I was. And I started taking classes here …  and talking to my dad again ... and writing this routine. I keep thinking about how I’ve always made jokes and bullshitted so that nobody would know how I really feel, so I figure I’ll try the reverse, and tell jokes about the truth.” He smiled and caught Barry’s eyes. His hand was curled up into a fist and it was pressed against his mouth and his eyes looked suspiciously wet. Kelly had one arm around him. Nathan decided to go off script. “And now I’m doing that and … all of my friends are here tonight, the ones I made back when all of this started and the ones I’ve made here. And Barry’s here, too, of course. I just wanted to tell all of them, but you especially, Simon, that … even though a lot of this has been pretty shit, I really don’t think I’d be alive today if it hadn’t played out exactly the way it had and if you weren’t exactly the person you are. So thank you.”

He let out a shaky breath and left the stage, barely hearing the applause.

  
  


They found each other in the lobby, and the first thing Simon did was kiss him, long and hard. Then Kelly hugged him, and then Becca. “You’re such a wanker,” Alisha told him, and Curtis clapped him on the back. The others just stood around, smiling slightly, until Nathan shouted, “All right, let’s get wasted!” and they all laughed.

Nathan already felt buzzed as they walked down the street. He’d done it. He’d actually fucking done it. He didn’t know how well he’d done it, but it was over. And hopefully if it stunk, it could be improved. He could improve it.

They went to Roxy’s Grilled Cheese, which had a big arcade in the backroom. Nathan suddenly realized how furiously hungry he was, and stuffed his face with grilled cheese and tater tots and downed two beers, immediately getting drunk. 

“Jesus, look at you!” Curtis laughed as Nathan stumbled into him. 

“It’s the antidepressants!” he shouted over the loud music and beeping of arcade booths, having a hard time wiping the stupid grin off his face. “The side effect of not wanting to die is that now I’m a lightweight!”

The rest of the night was a blur of bright lights and laughter and fun. Nathan discovered that there was a jukebox and started playing “Kids in America” by Kim Wilde over and over again. “That’s us!” he said to Barry excitedly. “We’re the Kids in America!” He was completely sincere in a way he almost never was, completely floored by how almost every lyric seemed to be written especially about him. Eventually Simon had to take away all his quarters and warn everyone not to give him any more, no matter what he said it was for.

Later he remembered playing the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles game with Simon, Curtis, and Kelly. (Alisha and Nikki declined.) “Because we’re superheroes too,” he kept explaining to them as they all shushed him. “Get it? What, what is it?”

“I was really fuckin’ worried about you,” Kelly confided to him at one point. She was also pretty unsteady on her feet and so they were sitting in a booth, eating gummy worms out of some ridiculous cocktail that Becca and Emily had been sharing. “You know I can’t hear what you’re thinkin’ when you’re thousands of miles away and we’re talkin’ on the phone, right? It’s really fuckin’ hard to have a serious conversation with you without reading your mind.”

“Can you read my mind now?” he asked groggily.

“Yeah,” she said, “though I wish I couldn’t, because all you’re thinkin’ about is how much you need to piss. Go to the toilets, you prick.”

Eventually they called a couple of Ubers because the buses had stopped running. It turned out Becca had picked up the Londoners from the airport earlier and dropped off their stuff at the apartment while he and Barry had gone for their walk, and they were all going to sleep over in the living room and stay for two more days before they went back home. He wound up squeezed into one car with Simon, Kelly, and Alisha. When the driver heard their accents and found out Kelly and Alisha were tourists, he insisted on driving them home along Memorial Drive so they could see the skyline at night. Nathan had a vague, drunken idea that this would double their drive time and their fee, but when they got there he had to admit it was worth it. “Best view in town,” the driver kept saying. The city looked  beautiful, all lit up and reflected on the still waters of the Charles River. He felt a sudden surge of affection for this place where he’d gradually fallen apart and then so painfully put himself back together again.

At some point on the drive he must have fallen asleep against Barry’s shoulder, because the next thing he remembered was being helped out of the car by him and Kelly, half carried upstairs to the apartment, and put to bed. He watched, eyes half lidded, as Simon undressed first him and then himself. “I love you,” he kept saying, “I love you.” Simon laughed and kissed him gently and turned off the lights. Then he climbed into bed next to him, and Nathan thought, “I’m safe here,” and fell asleep again.

  
  


The two days went by too fast. Nathan wanted to show them everything, and he was still so high off of his performance that he had the energy to do it, even if they all didn’t. They crammed as much as they could into the time they had, though. Nathan was worried that everyone would treat him like he was made of glass or whatever but it was pretty much just like old times, to his relief. Nobody had qualms about calling him a dickhead or laughing at him. 

“Is this for real?” Curtis said the first morning they stayed over, when Nathan walked through the living room carrying Asbo in his arms like a little baby.

“What?” he said defensively. “She likes it!” Indeed, she was purring like a little engine.

“I just never took you for a cat person, I guess,” Nikki said. 

“I don’t like cats, I just like Asbo,” he muttered, sitting down and letting her crawl up his chest and sit perched half on his shoulder and half on the back of the chair. Had he gone soft? Domestic?

Yes, he probably had. He supposed it wasn’t so bad.

 

Eventually it was time to drive everyone back to Logan and say goodbye.

Kelly gave him a long hug. “Call me,” she said. “You can talk to me about anything, stop hiding everything from me, okay?”

“You’re one to talk,” he said. “When were you going to tell me about Alisha? Have you two figured out a way to bang yet?” 

She punched him in the side and then hugged him again.

“Has Barry told you about how he thinks he might have lost his power?” he asked. When she shook her head, her brow furrowed, he said, “Talk to him about it. Maybe it’ll help her.” They both glanced at Alisha, who was talking to Simon. She was wearing long sleeves and pants and gloves, even in the unseasonably warm spring weather. 

“Yeah,” Kelly said. “I will.”

  
  


When they got home he had a text from Agnes, saying that if he ever wanted to do the Wild Rumpus again, there’d be a spot available for him. He laid on his bed for awhile, thinking. Then he opened up his laptop and started to write.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not a comedian. IDK if Nathan's act is any good. It was one of the first things I started writing for this story and the first half has been sitting in my Google Drive since March. In some ways it was inspired by Hannah Gadsby's technique of delivering a very serious story after a bunch of jokes, though I'm sure she's not the only comedian to do that. And I would also say this story as a whole is inspired by some of the things she says in Nanette about the nature of comedy, that jokes consist of a set up and punchline, and a punchline needs tension, and tension needs trauma to fuel it. So traditionally comedy is all about building up tension using trauma for the punchline, but then it just ends there, and the only way to release it is laughter, but that doesn't always cure the trauma. I kind of feel like Nathan's entire arc in Misfits is like that. We never end up getting past the punchline with him, every time it seemed like we might they pulled it back, probably because they felt like they'd lose something with his character if he stopped being the punchline and moved past it. So I wanted to write about post-punchline Nathan.
> 
> You can read an entire transcript of Nanette [here](https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2018/07/21/hannah-gadsby-nanette-transcript/) by the way.
> 
> "Celtic" -- Nathan is referring to the way the Boston Celtics basketball team is pronounced. It's weird.
> 
> [Roxy's Grilled Cheese and ](https://www.roxysgrilledcheese.com/)[A4cade](https://www.a4cade.com/). I actually don't think they have a jukebox but I added one anyway. They definitely have the TMNT game there though.
> 
> I did my Spotify Year in Review yesterday while I was writing this and [Kids in America](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_GH6M7cUq4) was my second most listened to song in 2019 apparently, so it wound up in here. It does fit Nathan very well!
> 
> [Memorial Drive in Cambridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Drive_\(Cambridge\)) ... the best view of the Boston City skyline.
> 
> Thanks again!


End file.
